Calculators may be required in the pursuit of happiness.

Antigonish is hosting an international conference this week on gross national happiness, an alternative measure to economics on how well society is doing.

It's the guiding principle in the Kingdom of Bhutan, a country in the Himalayas that has sent 20 people to this conference, called Rethinking Development, where delegates will try to come up with ways to measure happiness.

"Happiness in general has to do with being able to balance the two most important aspects of life, and that is the material needs of the human being as well as the spiritual needs," said Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's home minister.

"Unfortunately, conventional development is biased and it's catering only to the material needs, and we think it's important that both are pursued through deliberate development policies."

Thinley said every development project and strategy should be analysed for its impact on the "four pillars" of national happiness: sustainable and equitable economic development, environmental conservation, cultural promotion and good governance.

When it comes to tourism, for example, Thinley said his small country wants only as many visitors as it can handle. Backpackers are discouraged, he said, because they add little economically and cause cultural and ecological harm.

Thinley will give a keynote address at the conference, which has attracted more than 450 people from 30 countries. They include academics, farmers, environmentalists, performers and entrepreneurs.

Nova Scotia may seem like an unlikely place to set out a new development agency, said organizer Ron Coleman, but its size makes it a good location to try out alternatives.

"Bhutan is a very little country in the Himalayas [and] has about the same population as Nova Scotia, so a small place might be better suited to be an experiment of a new kind of development than a big place," said Coleman, executive director of GPI Atlantic, a non-profit research group.

After attending the first conference on happiness in Bhutan last year, Coleman was inspired to organize this meeting in Antigonish. He has been working since 1997 to define a Genuine Progress Index (GPI) as an alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

"In a way, we have a better chance here in Nova Scotia. We have more opportunity and more leeway than perhaps we would in Toronto, where they're more hooked to the GDP bandwagon," Coleman said.

Mary Coyle, with the Coady International Institute in Antigonish, agrees. The conference has her thinking of Father Moses Coady, credited with starting a movement of credit unions and co-operatives in the area in the 1920s.

"As Bhutan talks about the concept of gross national happiness as the outcome that they want to see for their country and their people, Coady talked about the good society," said Coyle, conference co-chair.

"I believe that Coady talked about – and that we're all still striving for – is one where there's a vibrant yet fair economy, is one where people have a voice and there's good governance, and that the environment is preserved and enhanced."