The "well-being" of the French, now a key factor in public policies

The Minister of Health Olivier Véran evokes "ill being, fed up, stress, anxiety, depression" and a "significantly degraded mental health of the French", Prime Minister Jean Castex notes "successive restrictive measures and whose impact is more and more difficult to bear "(Jean Castex), while Emmanuel Macron implores us:" we must hold on ".

For several months, the executive seems to be basing its decisions more and more on the appreciation of the morale of the French, measured in particular by the CoviPrev survey launched by Public Health France in March 2020, underlines Claudia Senik, professor at the Paris School of Economics.

Sign of this new attention to the psychological distress from which some French people suffer, the announcement in mid-January of a "psy check" that students can use to consult a psychologist and follow care.

“Until then, the government was in a dilemma between health and the economy.

Now we have realized that there is a third dimension that influences both: mental health and well-being. This is why we do not close schools, for example, "explains Claudia Senik, co-author of the 2020 report on" Well-being in France "published by the Center for Economic Research and its Applications (Cepremap).

Long before Covid-19, economists were already calling for new indicators to be taken into account to measure the quality of life and well-being of residents.

In 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned the Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz for a report to improve the measurement of economic performance and social progress, which however remains in the pipeline. In 2018, the OECD published a report titled "Beyond GDP", calling for the forging of new indicators to measure "economic and social performance".

After the crisis of "yellow vests", the subject returns to the table. "It is urgent that the territorial public policies change objective to aim more at the well-being and the quality of life" of the citizens, affirm, in a study which is devoted to them and published by the Council of economic analysis (CAE) , Claudia Senik and Yann Algan.

In other countries, this notion of "well-being" is part of the panoply of economic indicators. For example, the British National Statistics Office (ONS) has been carrying out surveys since 2012. Brits' levels of happiness, sense of accomplishment and anxiety are assessed there once a year.

Claudia Senik notes that this "is spreading in many countries. Well-being will become an indicator of the success of public policies, beyond classic indicators such as the return to employment. It is more interesting than aggregate measures like gross inner happiness ".