Looking Back 

Our team developed the WELLBY (“Wellbeing-Year”) – the unit of account at the heart of the modern wellbeing approach – and first made the case for (subjective) wellbeing as the goal of government (Frijters et al., 2020). In the UK, HM Treasury now values a WELLBY at £13,000 (in 2019 prices), and governments from New Zealand to Scandinavia are adopting or weighing it. 

In A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making (Frijters & Krekel, 2021), we showed how to put the WELLBY to work, with methods for wellbeing-augmented cost-benefit and, above all, wellbeing cost-effectiveness analysis. Those methods became the basis for HM Treasury’s Green Book Supplementary Guidance on Wellbeing (HM Treasury, 2021), the official guidance on how to use wellbeing data in policy analysis across UK Government. 

We keep extending the toolkit. In our Value-for-Money project (2023-25), we put these methods to work on major policy choices alongside UK Government partners – work that feeds into the forthcoming book Value for Money: The New Cost-Benefit Analysis Targeting People’s Wellbeing (Frayman et al., 2026) and the next update of the Green Book guidance, which our team is writing. 

Looking Ahead

Next, we are making wellbeing appraisal routine. In our WELLMOD project (2025-2029), we are building the first wellbeing policy simulation model of its kind, automating appraisal in the spirit of the tax-and-benefit models treasuries and finance ministries are already relying on. The international research consortium spans LSE, the Paris School of Economics, the University of Luxembourg, and the Polish Academy of Sciences, with support from the European Commission’s EUROMOD team. 

And we are opening the next frontier: experiential valuation (Krekel & MacKerron, 2025) values activities and places from people’s experiences of happiness in the moment as they go about their daily lives, reaching where the WELLBY may be too coarse, such as valuing time and place. An independent review for the UK Department for Transport (DfT) found it produces travel-time values broadly reconcilable with the department’s own appraisal guidance.