Gross National Happiness
The phrase ‘gross national happiness’ was first coined by the 4th King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the late 1970s when He stated, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.” The concept implies that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards notions of progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing and happiness.
Since then, the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH) has influenced Bhutan’s development policy, and also captured the imagination of others far beyond its borders. In creating the Gross National Happiness Index, Bhutan sought to create a measurement tool that would be useful for policymaking and create policy incentives for the government, NGOs and businesses of Bhutan to increase societal wellbeing and happiness.
The GNH Index includes both traditional areas of socio-economic concern such as living standards, health and education and less traditional aspects of culture, community vitality and psychological wellbeing. It is a holistic reflection of the general wellbeing of the Bhutanese population rather than a subjective psychological ranking of ‘happiness’ alone.
Structure of the GNH Index
The framework contains nine constituent domains of GNH. They are psychological wellbeing, health, time use and balance, education, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards. The nine domains include 33 GNH conditions expressed as indicators. The indicators and domains aim to emphasise different aspects of wellbeing and human flourishing, and different ways of meeting underlying human needs.
By assessing nine domains and 33 indicators, the GNH Index provides a comprehensive and balanced assessment of Bhutan's progress as a nation. Concretely, the GNH Index measures whether or not each individual has attained sufficiency in each of the 33 GNH conditions. For the GNH Index, a person is classified as happy if she or he has sufficiency in at least 66% of the 33 weighted indicators or domains. The GNH Index combines the share of happy persons with the sufficiency achieved among the not-yet-happy people. It runs from 0 to 1, with values closer to 0 suggesting low GNH and 1 being a perfect score.
The nine domains are equally weighted because each domain is considered to be equal in terms of its intrinsic importance as a component of GNH. The 33 indicators are statistically reliable, normatively important, and are easily understood by large audiences. Within each domain, two to four indicators have been selected that seemed likely to remain informative across time, had high response rates, and were relatively uncorrelated. Within each domain, the objective indicators are given higher weights while the subjective and self-reported indicators are assigned far lighter weights.
The Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies constructed the GNH Index using the Alkire-Foster method. The GNH Index is calculated as 1 minus MPI, focusing on sufficiency rather than deprivation. By generating average sufficiency and applying a happiness cutoff of 66%, the measure determines the proportion of people classified as 'happy', with the remainder categorized into the 'not yet happy' group....Click here to read more
The phrase ‘gross national happiness’ was first coined by the 4th King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the late 1970s when He stated, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.” The concept implies that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards notions of progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing and happiness.
Since then, the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH) has influenced Bhutan’s development policy, and also captured the imagination of others far beyond its borders. In creating the Gross National Happiness Index, Bhutan sought to create a measurement tool that would be useful for policymaking and create policy incentives for the government, NGOs and businesses of Bhutan to increase societal wellbeing and happiness.
The GNH Index includes both traditional areas of socio-economic concern such as living standards, health and education and less traditional aspects of culture, community vitality and psychological wellbeing. It is a holistic reflection of the general wellbeing of the Bhutanese population rather than a subjective psychological ranking of ‘happiness’ alone.
Structure of the GNH Index
The framework contains nine constituent domains of GNH. They are psychological wellbeing, health, time use and balance, education, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards. The nine domains include 33 GNH conditions expressed as indicators. The indicators and domains aim to emphasise different aspects of wellbeing and human flourishing, and different ways of meeting underlying human needs.
By assessing nine domains and 33 indicators, the GNH Index provides a comprehensive and balanced assessment of Bhutan's progress as a nation. Concretely, the GNH Index measures whether or not each individual has attained sufficiency in each of the 33 GNH conditions. For the GNH Index, a person is classified as happy if she or he has sufficiency in at least 66% of the 33 weighted indicators or domains. The GNH Index combines the share of happy persons with the sufficiency achieved among the not-yet-happy people. It runs from 0 to 1, with values closer to 0 suggesting low GNH and 1 being a perfect score.
The nine domains are equally weighted because each domain is considered to be equal in terms of its intrinsic importance as a component of GNH. The 33 indicators are statistically reliable, normatively important, and are easily understood by large audiences. Within each domain, two to four indicators have been selected that seemed likely to remain informative across time, had high response rates, and were relatively uncorrelated. Within each domain, the objective indicators are given higher weights while the subjective and self-reported indicators are assigned far lighter weights.
The Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies constructed the GNH Index using the Alkire-Foster method. The GNH Index is calculated as 1 minus MPI, focusing on sufficiency rather than deprivation. By generating average sufficiency and applying a happiness cutoff of 66%, the measure determines the proportion of people classified as 'happy', with the remainder categorized into the 'not yet happy' group....Click here to read more
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