Wellbeing and its improvability as a national goal

Abstract

Wellbeing has long been a discussion point for national policy when considering the impact of social and economic policy. Depending on one’s professional outlook, however, we may all arrive at quite different connotations of what wellbeing actually reflects. Consequently, quite different interventions to wellbeing improvement may be considered. Traditionally defined in terms of economic growth and wealth accumulation, more recent wellbeing definitions have incorporated other objective and measurable social indicators including, but not limited to, health-care provision, education access, housing affordability and equality, which have been used to provide an objective measure of quality of life. In contrast, for others,