Giving Compass' Take:

• Joe McCarthy reports that New Zealand is shifting to measure success by human well-being rather than GDP growth after feedback from the public. 

• What are the advantages of this measure of success? How can funders work to respond to public priorities as New Zealand has? 

• Learn about the future of well-being in a tech-saturated world. 

When countries want to measure the success of their economies, they should assess human well-being instead of gross domestic product (GDP), New Zealand's finance minister, Grant Robertson, said at the World Bank’s Spring Meetings in Washington, DC Wednesday.

Robertson said that the only way to ensure a country's long-term economic growth is through investments in essential services and basic necessities like education, health care, skills training, and overall levels of happiness. And these investments are only becoming more vital as the world undergoes rapid technological change, he stressed.

“We don’t know what jobs will be there in 20 years time,” he said. “But the knowledge and learning happening now will drive success then.”

“Those core things of being able to be collaborate, to be empathetic, to understand people, to be creative, and to solve complex problems ... [We need to] orient education systems around that,” he added.

Robertson said that New Zealand's general public was the driving force behind this change in perspective.

Although the country has had strong levels of GDP growth for years, everyday people regularly point to its high levels of homelessness, childhood poverty, and polluted rivers as signs that New Zealand is failing to live up to its potential.

This public sentiment led to a shift in the government's perspective and government agencies are now expected to take human welfare into consideration when developing budgets.

Read the full article about measuring success by human well-being by Joe McCarthy at Global Citizen.