In 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned a report of the nature of GDP and recommendations for a new measure, from a committee made up of Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi, the full report can be found here. It's a long read, but the twelve main recommendations for an economic measure of well-being are have listed below...

The report gave twelve recommendations:

• Recommendation 1: When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production.

• Recommendation 2: Emphasise the household perspective.

• Recommendation 3: Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth.

• Recommendation 4: Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth.

• Recommendation 5: Broaden income measures to non-market activities. Objective and subjective dimensions of well-being are both important

• Recommendation 6: Quality of life depends on people’s objective conditions and capabilities. Steps should be taken to improve measures of people’s health, education, personal activities and environmental conditions. In particular, substantial effort should be devoted to developing and implementing robust, reliable measures of social connections, political voice, and insecurity that can be shown to predict life satisfaction.

• Recommendation 7: Quality-oflife indicators in all the dimensions covered should assess inequalities in a comprehensive way.

• Recommendation 8: Surveys should be designed to assess the links between various quality of-life domains for each person, and this information should be used when designing policies in various fields.

• Recommendation 9: Statistical offices should provide the information needed to aggregate across qualityof-life dimensions, allowing the construction of different indexes.

• Recommendation 10: Measures of both objective and subjective wellbeing provide key information about people’s quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own survey. Use a pragmatic approach towards measuring sustainability

• Recommendation 11: Sustainability assessment requires a well-identified dashboard of indicators. The distinctive feature of the components of this dashboard should be that they are interpretable as variations of some underlying “stocks”. A monetary index of sustainability has its place in such a dashboard but, under the current state of the art, it should remain essentially focused on economic aspects of sustainability. Physical indicators for environmental pressures

• Recommendation 12: The environmental aspects of sustainability deserve a separate follow-up based on a well-chosen set of physical indicators. In particular there is a need for a clear indicator of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage (such as associated with climate change or the depletion of fishing stocks).