France adopts 'happiness index'

A new report on French economic growth was delivered to President Nicolas Sarkozy

France plans to include happiness and well-being in its measurements of economic progress, President Nicolas Sarkozy has said.

Revealing the changes he invited other countries to join in a "revolution" in the way growth is tracked after the global economic crisis.

France will adapt its statistics to take in the recommendations of two Nobel economists Mr Sarkozy commissioned 18 months ago to analyse new ways of measuring social progress.

France - whose growth has lagged behind its peers in recent decades according to standard measures - will also try to convince other governments to change their economic tracking, Mr Sarkozy said

"A great revolution is waiting for us," he said on the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank.

"For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos."

"The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so," he said.

Measuring well-being would make France's economy, famous for its short working week and generous social benefits, look more rosy.

"If leisure has no accounting value because it's essentially full of non-market activities like sport or culture, we put productivity below human fulfilment," Mr Sarkozy said.

Mr Sarkozy asked US economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel economics prize and a critic of free-market economists, and Amartya Sen of India, who won the 1998 Nobel prize for work on developing countries, to lead the analysis of growth tracking.