Gross National Happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define standard of living in more holistic terms than Gross National Product, looking at wellbeing rather than consumption. The Standard of living refers to the quality and quantity of goods and services available to people. ... Measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate the value of goods and services produced in an economy. ... Consumption is also an archaic name for the disease tuberculosis, presumably because, prior to the age of modern antibiotics, often it would seem that the disease was consuming patients from within as they coughed up blood. ...
The term was coined by Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972. It signalled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Jigme Singye Wangchuk, or in a pronunciation-based Romanization Jimi Singgê Wangchu (born November 11, 1955) is the king of Bhutan. ... 1972 was a leap year that started on a Saturday. ... Statues of Buddha such as this, the Tian Tan Buddha statue in Hong Kong, remind followers to practice right living. ...
Alternative indicators of economic progress have been supported by a number of NGOs such as the UK's New Economics Foundation. A non-governmental organization (NGO) is an organization which is not a part of a government. ...
References
Layard, Richard (2005), Happiness: Lessons from a new Science, The Penguin Press
External links
Nadia Mustafa, Time, 10 January 2005, "What About Gross National Happiness?" [1] (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1016266,00.html?promoid=rss_top)
Rajni Bakshi, Resurgence, 25 January 2005, "Gross National Happiness" [2] (http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/21083/)
"Gross National Happiness - a set of discussion papers", Centre for Bhutan Studies [3] (http://www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/publications/gnh/gnh.htm)
Institute of Empirical Research in Economics, Zurich University [4] (http://www.iew.unizh.ch/index.en.html) – Working papers [5] (http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/index.en.php) search with "happiness"
The authors note that comparisons of people's answers regarding happiness in one country to answers to the same questions in another country is "probably hazardous" because of different languages and cultures that may cause biases in such happiness surveys.
Happiness measures, Blanchflower and Oswald add, "can tell politicians and others how citizens value the different effects upon well-being of diverse influences such as unemployment, the divorce rate, real income, friendship, traffic jams, crime, health, and much else.
Happiness is U-shaped in age - that is, it falls off for a while, then stabilizes, and rises later in life.
In economics, gross domestic product (GDP) is a measure of the value of economic production of a particular territory in financial capital terms during a specified period.
GDP differs from gross national product (GNP) in excluding inter-country income transfers, in effect attributing to a territory the product generated within it rather than the incomes received in it.
The relative size of government expenditure compared to GDP as a whole is critical in the theory of crowding out, and the Keynesian cross.
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