China, like most other countries, has been using GDP to measure its economic development. But the United Kingdom has decided to use gross national happiness (GNH), which is supposed to make people's welfare the real goal of a country, says an article in Beijing News. Excerpts:

GDP measures a country's economic status, whereas GNH measures a society from different aspects such as health standards, social welfare, economic output and the quality of its environment, giving government departments a real view of people's lives.

At the practical level, however, GNH appears to be subjective and influenced by regional differences and traditions, and cannot quantify the national economy as accurately as GDP.

Therefore, GNH can serve only as a beneficial supplement to GDP. As such, there is no contradiction between the two because the purpose of a government's efforts to increase GDP is to make its people lead better lives.

A higher GNH would make a country's population more active in creating social wealth, which will eventually boost GDP.

But introducing a new assessment system like GNH will help measure the level of people's satisfaction with government's policies and economic practices.

Though China's GDP in the third quarter of this year surpassed that of Japan and made it the second largest economy in the world, there has no been no obvious increase in the level of Chinese people's happiness.

Therefore, as the Chinese government pursues a high GDP growth, it could think of introducing GNH at some point in the near future to measure the satisfaction level of the people. This will give the government a scientific standard to assess the real benefits that a high GDP growth rate has brought to society.