New Zealand abolishes GDP-the measure, reports the Veckans Affärer. Instead, the country’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has developed a new way to measure the country’s social and economic growth. From this year, the government has to present a ”welfare budget” that will measure how the long-term, political decisions affect people’s lives.
”In New Zealand we have about 3 percent growth and 3.9 percent unemployment. Using traditional standards, people had looked at us and said ’it goes well for you’. But we have a staggering high percentage of the homeless and among the highest självmordsstatistiken among young people in OECD countries. Our mental health and our well-being is not what it should be,” she said in the summit in Davos, in January.
called ”the living standards framework”, and politicians should respond to the tool when taking a new decision. Four different indicators of well-being is measured in the new tool – social capital, natural capital, human capital and financial capital. The answer to how New Zealand’s wellbeing as a total can only be answered if you look at these four indicators.
Among other things, this means a gauge that statistics on child poverty will be presented in each budget. Also, you need ministers who will spend money to show how the decision benefit several generations to come.
doing now will not yield results until about 20 years. But if you look at politics through a lens of kindness, empathy and well-being, so it really doesn’t matter what happens over decades,” said prime minister Jacinda Ardern in the context of Davos, writes Veckans Affärer.
But New Zealand is not the first country to give thumbs down to gdp. During the 1970s launched the Buthan ”Gross National Happiness” (GNH), translated into gross national happiness. Just like New Zealand, and the tool measured the Buthans systems ranging from health, education to cultural diversity.
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