Well-being is a concept difficult to define and eventually harder to quantify. The idea of
providing descriptions and metrics to evaluate well-being goes back to Aristotle (1095 bc)
and from there an increasingly large number of studies attempted to quantify well-being of
individuals and societies. Well-being is generally perceived as a description of the state of
human life which always captured the attention of sociologists, economists, psychologist,
politicians and citizens, making it a largely debated interdisciplinary topic. In particular in
recent times, characterized by even increasing concerns related to the economic and the
environmental situation, an increasing attention has been devoted to determining integrated
descriptions to include all the aspects of human life. In addition, a large attention,
demonstrated by the increasing literature on the topic, has also been devoted to the
contribution of politics and societal organization in the progress toward well-being. The first
part of this report tries to review the existing literature on well-being. Two main broad wellbeing
approaches will be considered, the subjective and the objective approaches. For every
one of them, the main definitions, the most important theoretical perspectives and the most
relevant metrics and quantifications will be reported. The major contribution is to provide a
synthesis of the vast literature that exists on the concept of well-being. In addition, by
presenting the most recent well-being approach based on the integration between the
objective and the subjective ones, an overview of the future directions of well-being
investigations is also provided.JRC.H.2-Air and Climat
