我们是否应该用国民幸福感来代替身均收入等经济指标来衡量一个国家发展水平呢？

This was the question posed by Well-being and Happiness, a high-level meeting which took place at the UN’s General Assembly in New York on April 2.
4月2日，“幸福感”经济会议在纽约联合国总部召开，这一题目也被提上了议程。

Participants at the event discussed a new economic paradigm called Gross National Happiness (GNH) to replace the traditional per capita Gross National Product (GNP) as a gauge of national progress.
与会者就国民幸福总值（缩写为GNH）这一全新经济范式否能取代人均国民出产总值(缩写为GNP)成为衡量国家发展的标尺这一题目展开讨论。

Happiness research, believe it or not, has been one of the hottest fields in development economics.
无论你相信与否，幸福感研究现已成为发展经济学中最热点的领域之一。

More and more economists are committed to studying what constitutes happiness and making recommendations to governments about how best to increase it.
越来越多的经济学家致力于研究幸福感的构成，并向政府提供如何最大程度进步国民幸福感的建议。

Columbia University’s Earth Institute in the US recently published the first World Happiness Report, commissioned by the UN.
美国哥伦比亚大学地球研究所近日受联合国委托，发布了首份《全球幸福指数讲演》。

The report finds that the world’s happiest countries are in northern Europe (Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands) and the most miserable are in Africa (Togo, Benin, Central African Republic, and Sierra Leone).
讲演显示，全球最幸福的国家为北欧的丹麦、挪威、芬兰及荷兰，而最不幸福的则长短洲国家多哥、贝宁、中非共和国和塞拉利昂。

The report is one of a number of new products from the happiness industry. According to The Washington Post, a group of experts including Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics, met last December to draw up measures of “subjective well-being”.
该讲演是促进幸福感工业的众多新产品之一。据翻译公司的报道，去年12月一个专家小组起草了一份“主观幸福感”的丈量方法，成员包括曾获诺贝尔经济学奖的心理学家丹尼尔?卡内曼。

The group is financed by the American government, and if its measures are deemed reliable they could become official statistics.
这一专家小组由美国政府资助，假如该丈量方法被视为可靠依据，便可能成为官方统计的数据。

If so, the United States would become the latest country to jump aboard the happiness bandwagon.
一旦实现，美国将成为引领幸福感潮流的国家。

According to a recent article on The Economics website, the French government started publishing its own happiness indicator in 2009.
据经济学人网站最新发布的一篇文章报道，法国政府自2009年便开始发布本国的幸福指标。给大家推荐一个网站http://www.bowwin.com/ 里面有很多翻译技巧文章