France: 'Measure well-being, not just growth'

PARIS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared on Monday that statisticians should find a way to measure the general well-being of the population rather than just raw economic growth.

Speaking at the launch of a report that he commissioned from Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Sarkozy said France would pioneer the new technique and urge other countries to follow suit.

The report was released at a time when many world economies are beginning to come out of recession, but unemployment is continuing to rise and consumer confidence to fall.

"In the whole world, citizens think that we're lying to them, that the figures are false and, worse, that they're being manipulated," Sarkozy said, calling for a new measure for economic performance.

In February last year, Sarkozy asked Stiglitz -- a former White House advisor and World Bank chief economist -- and a panel of experts to find new ways to measure growth taking into account social well-being.

"It is time for our statistics system to put more emphasis on measuring the well-being of the population than on economic production," Stiglitz wrote, in a summary of his commission's report released Monday.

Currently, growth is measured as a percentage increase or decrease in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is a measure of the value of goods and services generated in a country and has long been seen by many as a crude benchmark.