Measuring sustainable and inclusive wellbeing: a multidimensional dashboard approach

Announced in the 2023 Strategic Foresight Report of the Commission, the sustainable and inclusive wellbeing initiative recognizes the usefulness of GDP but also the need for complimentary indicators to fully capture all aspects of the quality of life, inclusiveness, and sustainability. One of its main objectives is to develop a multidimensional dashboard, which integrates existing tools and frameworks into a set of indicators that provide a holistic view of the wellbeing of people and the planet. This development involved a rigorous process in an inter-service working group, narrowing down over a thousand potential measures to a comprehensive dashboard of 140 and eventually 50 indicators. Besides documenting the process, this report presents some preliminary analyses based on the dashboard of 50 indicators and corresponding synthetic indices. The analysis shows that the state of wellbeing and its components in the European Union varies across Member States, presenting important examples of a decoupling of wellbeing from income. While there is a general correlation between economic prosperity and wellbeing, there are notable exceptions and trade-offs between different aspects of wellbeing. In times of renewed discussions around the need to boost EU’s competitiveness, the SIWB dashboard can be a central monitoring tool to make sure that reigniting Europe’s economic engine does not become an end in itself but rather a means for delivering wellbeing to all people of the current and future generations, and to the planet.