Details

Over the past two decades, the measurement of human well-being has also received a lot of attention. Indeed, in the policy sphere, the measure of well-being has become a routine activity. Therefore, happiness has recently been incorporated into many national constitutions as a mark of the realization that happiness is an essential component of successful governance for the increased well-being of society (Global Happiness and Well-being Policy Report, 2019). Recently, the General Assembly of the United Nations unanimously approved a resolution (A/RES/65/309) that calls for viewing happiness as a holistic approach to development and for considering additional measures that better capture the importance of the pursuit of happiness and well-being in progress to guide public policies. To conduct this, the science of happiness has become a source that governments reference to ensure that citizens’ well-being is a feasible goal for governments and public policy strategies. 
This paper presents a synthetic review of three different approaches to measuring well-being in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) context. The UAE government's vision is to become one of the happiest nations in the world by the 50th anniversary of its nationhood in 2021. It presents evidence on the importance of social indicators' well-being and the extent to which they are correlated with GDP per capita. It considers subjective measures of happiness and life satisfaction. The second part of the paper describes the progress made in several countries to measure well-being and applies those measures in national government policy settings to deal with more recent initiatives undertaken at the international level to improve the measurement systems.