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Case Study On Gross National Happiness In Bhutan

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Case study: Gross National Happiness in Bhutan Abstract As a society we care about what we measure, we use what we measure, and what we measure drives policies and society in a particular direction. We therefore need to measure progress correctly. If societies blindly accept GDP as their measure of progress, they might be trying to maximize the wrong indicator for society. Bhutan as a living example of a society that has opened a national dialogue about what progress means, and they have created the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index to reflect their understanding of progress. Furthermore, the political and economic architecture of Bhutan is structured around maximizing GNH rather than GDP. We can draw a number of lessons from the Bhutanese experiment, namely that each individual society should strive to answer the following three • What does progress mean? • How do we develop indicators that measure progress? • How de we use indicators to shape policies and institutions? All societies seek to create wellbeing for individuals. The question is not whether societies desire welfare or not. The fundamental questions are: what does wellbeing mean? How do we measure it? And how do we organize society and its institutions …show more content…

Indicators reveal particular information about society. They thus embody values that people care about or at least should care about, if indicators are to drive the policies that push society in a genuine direction of progress. As a society we value what we measure and we use what we measure to make decisions that impact people’s lives. “Why are indicators important? Policymakers increasingly look at data like GDP to make decisions about what are good policies” Therefore, if indicators don’t measure what people care about and a country’s economic and political architecture is designed to maximize the value of those indicators, the indicators might increase but society might not be

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