Sarkozy wants happiness used as economic indicator

France plans to include happiness and well-being in its measurements of economic progress, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said today, beckoning other countries to join in a "revolution" in the way growth is tracked after the global economic crisis.

France will adapt its statistical toolbox as recommended by two Nobel economists whom Sarkozy commissioned 18 months ago to analyse new ways of measuring social progress, he said in a speech in Paris on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

France - whose growth has lagged its peers in recent decades according to standard measures - will also try to convince other governments to change their economic tracking, Sarkozy said.

"A great revolution is waiting for us," he said. "For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos."

"The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so," he said.

Measuring well-being would make France's economy, famous for its short workweek and generous social benefits, look more rosy.