Welfare or quality of life reflects the extent that people's want or need is satisfied. Subjective happiness reflects the general appraise of people for their living status, which deprives the "mean" and "goal", able to measure quality of life directly. The Gross National Happiness (GNH), which defined as the degree to which citizens in a country enjoy the life they live, combined with the longevity, which defined as happy life-expectance (HLE), can reflects the ability that a region satisfies its residents' need and want. In this research, taking the Heihe River basin as an example, using HLE as an indicator, the development status of different regions was appraised. As a whole, the development status of Heihe River basin is at middle or superior level. But there are differences within county and between city and country. In the county level, those which have better development status are Jiayuguan and Jinta; in the village and town level, those which have better development status are Dazhuangzi in Suzhou District and Minghua in Sunan County.

Download Here