While much of the world is fixated on the quest for gross domestic product growth, wealth and modernity, Bhutan — a landlocked kingdom with a tiny population squeezed between India and China — has chosen a different path, emphasizing human happiness and well-being.
Does the Bhutan model hold the key to a prosperous, sustainable future for all?
In the 1970s, Bhutan’s fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, declared that GDP was less important than “Gross National Happiness” (GNH). After all, the goal of economic growth, as Bhutanese Prime Minister Lyonchhen Dasho Tshering Tobgay later put it, was always supposed to ensure people’s “contentment” and enable them to become “better human beings, socially, economically and morally.”
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