Replacing GDP targets with wellbeing sounds appealing. Those (very) few countries that have tried it are retreating from the idea, however.
Zack Polanski delivered his first major economic speech as Green Party leader in London in March. A Green government, he said, would scrap targets for gross domestic product and judge itself by how it grew mental health, public services and community cohesion. Daniel Finkelstein, a Conservative peer, had interviewed Polanski the previous October and pressed him on the same point. Polanski cited Simon Kuznets, the economist who built the modern concept of national accounts in the 1930s, on the limits of his own invention. Membership of the Greens has more than tripled to over 220,000 since Polanski took over in September 2025. His party won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, took 376 council seats in the May local elections and now polls at around 14 per cent.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Centre on Well-being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity updated its Well-being Data Monitor last November, drawing on more than 80 indicators across three dashboards. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) refreshed Britain’s own Measures of National Well-being in February, tracking 59 indicators across 10 domains. The Treasury’s Green Book has required wellbeing appraisal in cost-benefit analysis since 2021. What Polanski proposes is to make the dashboard the primary target rather than a supplementary read-out.
Two countries got there first. Grant Robertson, then New Zealand’s finance minister, delivered the world’s first Wellbeing Budget in May 2019. Five priorities were named: child wellbeing, mental health, productive work, Māori and Pacific opportunities, and climate and environment. Five years on, Stats NZ reported that one in eight children lived in households experiencing material hardship in the year to June 2023, an increase of two percentage points on the previous year. New Zealand’s auditor-general reported in March 2024 that young New Zealanders still could not access mental-health services despite spending of 1.9 billion New Zealand dollars. Nicola Willis, finance minister in the new National-led coalition, told reporters in March 2024 that she would not deliver another Wellbeing Budget. The framework had become, in her phrase, a “marketing” exercise.
King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan introduced the concept of Gross National Happiness in 1972. The country’s GNH Index, which scores 33 indicators across nine domains, rose from 0.743 in 2010 to 0.781 in 2022. Youth unemployment climbed to around 29 per cent over the same period (it has since fallen to around 17 per cent). An estimated 66,000 to 75,000 Bhutanese, close to a tenth of the population, live abroad. Tshering Tobgay, who became prime minister for the second time in January 2024, told CNBC in May 2024 that his country was “teetering on the brink of collapse”. His government published its 13th Five-Year Plan, covering 2024 to 2029, with a target of increasing real GDP tenfold by 2050.
What gets measured
Jane Davidson, then Welsh minister for environment, sustainability and housing, proposed the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act in 2014. The Senedd passed it the following year. Sophie Howe became the first Future Generations Commissioner in April 2016. Welsh ministers cited the Act when they extended free school meals to all primary school pupils in 2022 and when they introduced a 20 mph default speed limit on residential streets in September 2023. Derek Walker, Howe’s successor, published the Future Generations Report 2025 in May last year. The Senedd held a post-legislative scrutiny session in November at which deputy commissioner Marie Brousseau-Navarro told MSs her office was still trying to baseline Welsh spending on prevention, ten years after the Act passed.
Sarah Davidson, chief executive of Carnegie UK, a wellbeing foundation, told the Big Issue in March that wellbeing metrics capture parts of life that GDP misses. Her foundation publishes the annual Life in the UK Index, which scored Wales at 60 out of 100 in 2024 across social, economic, environmental and democratic domains. The OECD’s Better Life Index, refreshed in November 2025, covers 11 domains from housing to civic engagement. The United Nations Statistical Commission adopted a revised System of National Accounts in March 2025 that kept GDP as the headline measure of economic activity.
Polanski told reporters after his March speech that he was much more interested in growing people’s mental health than in GDP targets. The Office for Budget Responsibility, set up by George Osborne in 2010, publishes quarterly GDP forecasts that the chancellor must meet or miss at each fiscal event. No equivalent body publishes quarterly forecasts for life satisfaction.
The ONS reported in February that life satisfaction in the third quarter of 2025 remained below its pre-pandemic peak. GDP per head in the fourth quarter of 2025 had returned to pre-pandemic levels, growing more slowly than before. The OECD published research alongside its November monitor showing that life satisfaction rises with GDP per head in nearly every cross-country comparison.
Nicola Willis confirmed at the New Zealand Treasury on March 2024 that the Wellbeing Budget would not return, though the 60 underlying indicators would continue to be reported alongside the regular budget process. For now, there appears to be no real or reliable replacement for GDP.
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