The Finnish Presidency of the European Union yesterday saw one of the main objectives of its six-month tenure at the helm introduced when the Council of the EU approved its economy of wellbeing initiative.

The initiative represents a paradigm shift from the staid status quo, which really appears to be doing no one on the lower rungs of the societal ladder any good when trickledown economics are not seeing the wealth of nations actually trickling down to them.

This is an issue that Malta is not unfamiliar with by any stretch of the imagination, with the numbers of people living on the edge of poverty and social exclusion having grown by around 10 per cent over the last 10 years.

This year the number of such deprived people walking amongst us will reach 90,000.

And given that situation, which is rather pronounced in Malta, the Finnish initiative could be just the elixir the country could use to, first of all, gauge the real situation on the ground and, secondly, to better address those people who are being left behind on the wake of the country’s much lauded, if perhaps artificially-inflated, economic boom.

All that glitters is certainly not gold, and gross domestic product is the be all and end all of everything.  What also matters is society’s overall wellbeing, which is quite another matter altogether, but it is one that is also intrinsically linked to GDP growth.  That is because we cannot improve our general wellbeing without economic growth, but, on the other hand, economic growth can certainly be achieved without increasing our wellbeing.

We have the distinct feeling that here on our islands, we have had an awful lot of economic growth according to official figures, but we certainly have not had very much growth in general wellbeing.

Malta along with every other EU member state has not been ‘invited’, and unfortunately not ‘forced’, to include an economy of wellbeing perspective horizontally in both their national and bloc-wide policies.  

Member states are also, importantly, being asked to put actual people and their actual wellbeing at the centre of all policy design.

The core concept is that while people’s wellbeing is a value in itself, it is also vitally important for the Union’s economic growth, productivity, long-term fiscal sustainability and societal stability.

Partit Demokratiku had backed the proposals foursquare last July when it had called for a national human wellbeing index to replace GDP. But one should not necessarily replace the other because they, quite naturally, need to complement each other and are not mutually exclusive.

The party had suggested that budget planning and policy decisions will be taken after considering the impact on human wellbeing, instead of solely relying on GDP.

A nation’s development cannot and should not be measured solely in terms of economic output but, rather, as PD had rightly posited, focus on a broader index that takes into account investment in education, health, environment and climate protection.

New Zealand, a trailblazer in so many ways, has already managed to reform its policy to focus on human well-being instead of GDP, and the World Bank has also been pushing for a reform in the way in which success is measured.

Now, the economic superpower that is the EU is following suit.

But how great would it be if Malta were to be the first EU state to implement this new call for a new measure of prosperity and growth?

Let’s not just pay lip service to this one. Any failure by the Maltese state to act on would not only represent a gross dereliction of duty to its people, but it would also bring to the surface a reticence to figure out where all the wealth that is being created is actually going and where, perhaps, it should instead go.

We can imagine how some of this might be somewhat unpopular for some, but this is an issue that affects the large majority of the population in their masses, and not just the top percentiles that call the shots in so many ways.

People, and not the golden calves that we have come to worship, need to be placed first and foremost in all policy formulation, and it is about time that we formalise this concept

This is the kind of Malta that will truly serve future generation in the decades to come.