Measuring Progress Towards a Wellbeing Economy

Report – Public Health Research & Practice, 5 July 2023

How to measure progress towards a wellbeing economy: distinguishing genuine advances from ‘window dressing’

The world is experiencing multiple intersecting urgent and existential crises, which have profound and inequitable implications for population health. Arguably, the design of the current, dominant economic system is the root cause of these crises, as it externalises impacts on nature, climate and population health, exacerbates inequalities, and rewards extraction, rent-seeking and social hierarchy.

A ‘wellbeing economy’, which aims to achieve social justice within planetary boundaries, has been proposed as an alternative approach to economic design. Many governments, businesses and organisations have expressed interest or commitment to this, but not at the required scale or with the required urgency. Indeed, there is the risk now that the radicalism of a wellbeing economy approach is undermined in its delivery thus far as it has either only been adopted in rhetoric or nascent form; or implemented only as isolated components rather than as part of a comprehensive shift.

The authors of this paper propose a series of criteria by which judgement can be made on whether progress towards a ‘wellbeing economy’ is occurring, and apply these criteria using a series of examples to show contrasts between genuine wellbeing approaches and wellbeing economy ‘window dressing’.

Read the full report here: https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2023-07/apo-nid323406.pdf.