It cannot be measured by "GDP"
New economic policy goals
What is "well-being"?

Before I started teaching at Asia University, I worked as a national civil servant. Having majored in economics at university, I wanted to use my knowledge of economics to contribute to the lives of the people, so in 1990, I joined the Economic Planning Agency (now the Cabinet Office). It was the height of the bubble economy. The Japanese economy was booming like never before. However, the bubble economy collapsed the following year. For over 30 years after that, I faced the turbulent times of the Japanese economy as an economic bureaucrat, and was engaged in the management of economic and fiscal policies and economic analysis. I was involved in writing the Economic and Fiscal White Paper a total of eight times, which comprehensively analyzes the annual economic and fiscal trends and summarizes the challenges, future prospects, policy directions, etc., and was also in charge of formulating the basic policy for economic and fiscal management and reform (the so-called Bone Policy), as well as the economic measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still fresh in everyone's memories.
During his time as an economic bureaucrat, he studied at Graduate School in the UK and earned Master’s Degree, and later served twice at the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), which is headquartered in Paris, France.
During my second posting to the OECD in 2009, I was assigned as Counsellor at the Permanent Mission of Japan to the OECD, where I played an important role in reflecting the government's intentions in OECD discussions. I was mainly in charge of economic policy and statistical work at the OECD, and that's when I came across the OECD Statistics Department's initiative on "well-being," or the creation of indicators to measure happiness and life satisfaction.
In 2008, then French President Sarkozy established the "Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress." This committee was also known as the Stiglitz Committee because it was chaired by Nobel Prize winner in economics Professor Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University, USA), and included 25 experts from the US, the UK, France, and India. In its 2009 report, the committee pointed out the limitations of GDP (gross domestic product), which had been used until then as an economic indicator of a country's social development, and recommended the need to develop sustainability indicators that incorporate the perspective of "well-being."
At the same time, in 2008, the world economy was hit by a major shock. The collapse of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered the "Lehman Shock," which developed into a global financial crisis and a major recession. This event also demonstrated the limits of the economic policies based on "neoliberalism," which had been the driving force behind globalization and the trust in market economy mechanisms up until that point.
In response to this situation, there was a growing momentum to reconsider economic policies that had previously focused on increasing GDP growth rates, and the perspective of "well-being" began to attract global attention as a new policy goal. The OECD also developed the Better Life Index (BLI) in 2011 based on the Stiglitz Commission report.
However, not all OECD member states supported the "Well-being" initiative from the beginning, as there was resistance to introducing a highly subjective, individual value such as "happiness" into an economic indicator that should be objective.
However, it was clear that the traditional "economic growth supremacy" was no longer working. For this reason, the Japanese government actively supported the OECD's "Well-being" initiative from the early stages. The administration at the time also considered improving happiness an important policy goal and set out to work on creating indicators to achieve this. As a member of the Japanese Government Delegation to the OECD, I was in close contact with people at the OECD Statistics Office and became deeply involved in the launch of the BLI, including through the provision of research funding from the Japanese government.
Since the BLI, other international organizations have also stepped up their well-being initiatives. The United Nations has published the World Happiness Report every year since 2012, and is also considering an economic indicator called "Beyond GDP" to replace GDP. To date, 35 OECD member countries, including Japan, have been working on measuring well-being. This growing global attention to well-being is deeply moving for me, as I have been deeply involved in this issue at the OECD since its early days.