So how do you do it?

What exactly is wellbeing, and how do you measure it?

A number of different organisations have come up with different answers to that question. The UN’s Human Development Index is one. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index is another.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has also developed a Sustainable Economic Development Assessment to measure how successfully countries translate economic growth into wellbeing.

There are others too, all trying to produce a more comprehensive picture of how well a country is doing. Governments generally treat these as useful. Few, however, have actually taken steps to foreground them.

Earlier this year, New Zealand did so by introducing the world’s first “wellbeing budget”. Recognising that many of its citizens are not actually seeing the benefit of a growing economy on their daily lives, the country specifically allocated resources to improving its national rate of wellbeing.

“The plan is to try to apply this approach to all of government spending, but the budget allocation this year was just about 5% – just new spending,” explained Andrew Aitken, senior economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in the UK.

“It also changed the process to require a more circular and collaborative process. Rather than individual ministries bidding to the treasury for funding, they had to collaborate with each other.

“The more successful bids were those that involved seeing the linkages between different policies.”