What happened to Bhutan’s ‘kingdom of happiness’?

The Guardian

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioural science at Oxford and one of the authors of the annual World Happiness Report, says that without a certain level of economic development, people don’t tend to rate themselves as happy. Bhutan’s own figures show this – those its surveys find happiest are those who are wealthiest, according to the Asia Development Bank.

“We can’t get around economic development,” says De Neve. It is an important part of people’s wellbeing, and Bhutan is “quite right” to focus more on per capita GDP, he says.