A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom - New York Times:
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: October 4, 2005
What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.
Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.

A Plateau of Happiness
The Second International Conference on Gross National Happiness
Discussion Papers on Gross National Happiness (from Center for Bhutanese Studies)
World Values Survey (from umich.edu) But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.
In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness."