The Assessment of "Well-Being" Performance: ISEW, BES and Other Potential Tools to Overcome GNP, GDP, GNI and Other Monetary-Centric Approaches

The multifaceted nature of the concept of “well-being” entails inevitable consequences starting from its definition, to the point of inducing potential interpretative ambiguities: on the one hand, it can be considered a function of people’s prosperity conditions; on the other hand, however, it can be framed according to the economic context. Despite the coexistence of both the aspects just mentioned, the economic dimension has always substantially prevailed over the psycho-physical one, determining evaluation processes of the “hierarchical” performances according to merely quantitative variables (money, profit, GDP, etc.). The synthetic outline just outlined highlights an evident fragility, mostly due to the numerous attempts to define with scientific precision a very complex conceptual element: the well-being of the person. Starting from this evidence, this work proceeds first with an analysis of the literature on the concept of well-being as a possible representation of performance. Secondly, an attempt is made to contextualise the “well-being performance” in the public sphere, illustrating the main critical elements relating to its measurement and evaluation. Consequently, potential attempts to overcome these critical issues are presented with particular reference to the Sustainable Economic Welfare Index (ISEW) and to the Fair and Sustainable Well-Being (BES): these two indexes are analyzed to identify the characteristics of alternative methodologies for the measurement of well-being, which does not it can always and deterministically be traced back to the measurement of exclusively economic or monetary variables. The potential reflections resulting from the research, albeit undoubtedly not conclusive, could represent the starting point for stimulating the scientific debate on such a delicate topic for the community, current and future, in order to also hypothesize possible regulatory reform processes at international level.