President Sarkozy, who ordered the French national statistics office, Insee, to come up with a new array of measurements, isn’t the only global leader who has questioned current metrics for wealth. Barack Obama raised the issue during his campaign for the U.S. presidency, and David Cameron, leader of the U.K.’s Conservative Party, has called for thinking about “general well-being” instead of just output.

So far, some banks and at least one country, Bhutan, have used quality-of-life indicators as a measure of a nation’s success and as an alternative to GDP. Bhutan employs an economic model it calls Gross National Happiness.

“After 30 years of applying this ancient principle, we’ve discovered it’s more important than gross domestic product,” former Prime Minister Kinzang Dorji said in a March 2008 interview. “GNH is a method of balancing sustainable growth against the often damaging results of rampant wealth.”

The Happy Planet Index, compiled by the London-based New Economics Foundation, an independent group promoting alternative forms of economic thinking, ranks Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica as the countries with the highest happiness rankings among 143 countries surveyed in 2009. The U.S. ranked 114th and Zimbabwe last. The HPI takes into account factors such as life expectancy, life satisfaction and resource consumption.