“Wellbeing Economy Governments” (WEGo)

From:	Martin Oetting, Omnipolis <martin, Berlin

Last November, the governments of Scotland, New Zealand and Iceland publicly launched the “Wellbeing Economy Governments“ initiative (short: “WEGo“) at an OECD forum in South Korea. The idea of the project: governments collaborating on policy approaches that see national success as being defined by the quality of life of citizens rather than the growth rate of the respective countries’ GDPs.

In the past months, two interesting things happened there — the New York Times reported about New Zealand’s first „Wellbeing Budget“, and the Policy Lab of the WEGo came together for the first time to start their actual collaboration. At this first Policy Lab, the two government heads of Scotland and Iceland made some very “Beyond GDP” interesting statements in their opening speeches. I have summarised these developments in a brief blog post on the website of our film project about Wellbeing Governments, which some of you may hopefully find interesting:
https://wellbeingeconomies.film/2019/06/23/the-wellbeing-economics-governments-are-moving-forward/