Measurement of social development: an international comparison

PQLI and HDI are the two most popular measures of development, besides per capita income. Over the years, PQLI appears to be not much in use for regional comparisons, especially after the introduction of HDI. While PQLI considers only the physical variables—adult literacy, life expectancy at birth and infant survival rate, HDI has life expectancy at birth, educational attainment and real GDP per capita (PPP$). PQLI and HDI are similar, the main difference between the two being the inclusion of income in HDI and exclusion of the same from PQLI. In a sense, HDI represents both physical and financial attributes of development and PQLI has only the physical aspects of life. The present author took the lines of PQLI to express development in terms of physical variables and considering development as a multidimensional phenomenon, Ray (1989) [Ray, A. K. (1989). On the measurement of certain aspects of social development, Social Indicators Research (Vol. 21, pp. 35–92). The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] included as many as 13 physical variables to represent social development across 40 countries; no financial variable was included in the construction of composite index, termed as the Social Development Index, SDI. Incidentally, like PQLI, SDI was introduced before HDI. Unlike PQLI and HDI, SDI considers (i) a large number of indicators representing various concern areas and (ii) a set of objective methods for combining the development indicators as a composite index. Ray (1989) has been restated and updated in this article with newer cross-country information. In the present study, SDI has been constructed for over 102 countries, including 21 OECD countries, using 10 development indicators, instead of 13 indicators in the past. Apart from presenting objective methods for combining indicators into SDI, the present study asserts that SDI works better than HDI as a measure of development for an international comparison. The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not of the institution he serves.     

Comparing MCDA Aggregation Methods in Constructing Composite Indicators Using the Shannon-Spearman Measure

Composite indicators have been increasingly recognized as a useful tool for performance monitoring, benchmarking comparisons and public communication in a wide range of fields. The usefulness of a composite indicator depends heavily on the underlying data aggregation scheme where multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is commonly used. A problem in this application is the determination of an appropriate MCDA aggregation method. Of the many criteria for comparing MCDA methods, the Shannon-Spearman measure (SSM) is one that compares alternative MCDA aggregation methods in constructing composite indicators based on the information loss concept. This paper assesses the effectiveness of the SSM using Monte Carlo approach-based uncertain analysis and variance-based sensitivity analysis techniques. It is found that most of the variation in the SSM arises from the uncertainty in choosing an aggregation method. Therefore, the SSM can be considered as an effective measure for comparing MCDA aggregation methods in constructing composite indicators. We also use the SSM to evaluate five MCDA aggregation methods in constructing composite indicators and present the findings.     

A Comparison of the Well-Being of Agricultural and Non Agricultural Households Using a Multicriterial Approach

The territorial approach of rural development requires taking into account economic, social and environmental features. Therefore, among the goals of the rural development policy the well-being of the target population cannot be disregarded. However, well-being is a multidimensional phenomenon and its measure could be complicated since many indicators (with different scale, units of measure, burden, trends) have to be estimated and analyzed. With a composite indicator which summarizes a bulk of information this concern can be overcome. A multicriteria approach of aggregation is proposed because cardinal aggregation involving in undesirable compensatory property.     

Measuring is Believing! Improving Conventional Indicators of Welfare State Development

Welfare effort (social spending as a percentage of GDP) has conventionally been the preferred measure for comparisons in space and time of the level of development of welfare states. However, a wide variety of other measuring systems are potentially available in this field, because there are different sources and different methods for calculating social spending, so a variety of indicators can be calculated, each of which best reflects a different aspect of social protection systems. This paper presents two innovations: first it proposes options other than those generally used to measure the relative development of welfare states. Secondly, it uses those new measurements to show that some widely accepted conclusions on the relative development of welfare states need to be reviewed.     

Multidimensional Analysis of Regional Inequality: The case of Hungary

Hungary has been in a transition process since the fall of the IronCurtain. This process has resulted in important developments in regionalpolicy. The introduction of a western style policy system seems,however, not to have affected regional inequality to any noticeableextent as measured by income per captia. There are still largedisparities between the richest counties and the remaining counties interms of this indicator. However, single indicator approaches toregional inequality have been criticised. Therefore in this paper weadopt a multidimensional approach to analyse regional inequality. Forthe counties of Hungary the multidimensionality of inequality is takeninto account by using a multiple of social and economic indicators thatare combined into a composite index. Theil's second measure ofmultidimensional inequality and principal component analysis are used toconstruct the composite index. The results thus obtained are used toidentify the least-favoured and the most-favoured regions. We find thatthere are substantial differences between the single indicator approachbased on per capita income and the multidimensional approach. Moreover,we argue that the EU Phare Programmes for Hungary have helped theeconomic development in developed regions situated on the EU border butat the same time have stimulated disparities within Hungary.     

Using Ranked Weights and Acceptability Analysis to Construct Composite Indicators: A Case Study of Regional Sustainable Society Index

A variety of published composite indicators, i.e., Energy Trilemma Index and Sustainable Society Index, are commonly aggregated with equal weights. However, this plausible scheme is criticized as eclecticism and ignores the discriminating power of the different indicators. Differing from the traditional methods that assign weights to each indicator for the purpose of aggregation, this paper proposes a new mechanism to construct composite indicators using ranked weights and stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis. More specifically, this study comprehensively consider all possible preferences among the indicators. Under each preference, we develop a sophisticated mathematical transformation to calculate the least and most favorable scores of each entity, which formulates the lower and upper bounds of the intervals. Then an interval decision matrix, alternatively described as a stochastic decision problem, is formulated to construct the composite indicators. Holistic acceptability indices are generated and regarded as a new composite indicator, which is capable of providing a comprehensive and robust composite indicator with more discriminating power. We apply the proposed method to modify the regional sustainable society index and present the obtained results and comparisons.     

Measuring rural development in Nigeria: The place of social indicators

The use of economic growth indicators for the purpose of measuring rural development has for a long time been in practice in Nigeria and in many other developing nations. The inadequacy of this measure in depicting development in the area of societal well-being has suggested that social indicators could be a more meaningful tool to monitor and evaluate the level and conditions of rural development. This paper highlights the information needs for, and problems of incorporating social indicators in the measurement of rural development in Nigeria. It is recognized that for social indicators to be a useful tool in a place such as rural Nigeria, they must reflect the sociocultural peculiarities and the life style of the country's rural population. The paper finally suggests an improvement of the quality of social statistics in rural Nigeria to enhance their functional values to planners and policy makers.     

An Overview and Evaluation of Composite Indices of Development

The search for alternative indicators of development has witnessedthe development of a variety of composite indices of development. Theseindices integrate various social, political and economic aspects ofdevelopment in measurement. This paper presents an overview andevaluation of composite indices of development in terms of certain broaddimensions of measurement. In terms of method and technique, compositeindices are generally additive ones with equally weighted componentsconsisting of variables selected in an ad hoc manner. Numerouscriticisms have been leveled at these methods employed in compositeindexing. Composite indices are mainly quantitative insofar as theindices are all presented in numerical format. Composite indices aresubject to subjectivity despite the relative objectivity of the methodsemployed in composite indexing. Composite indices are of a cardinalnature, but remain ordinal insofar as differences in index values cannotbe interpreted meaningfully. The multidimensionality of compositeindices represents one of their main advantages. Indices representaggregate measures of a combination of complex development phenomena.The comparative application of composite indices of development overspace and time remains problematic. Composite indices generally combinemeasures of ends and means. In respect of method and technique,composite indexing is relatively complex. Composite indices arerelatively flexible, because changes in selection, scaling, weightingand aggregation can be effected readily, albeit at the cost ofcomparability. Composite indices perform relatively well in terms ofcross-national availability, but few indices perform well in terms ofinter-temporal availability. On the strength of the systematic positiveassociation between income and popular composite indices such as theHDI, many have claimed that these indices represent no real contributionto the literature on indicators research. Composite indices,furthermore, are often considered to be ideological statements ratherthan practically functional indicators. Yet, composite indices representuseful supplements to income-based development indicators. These indicesremain invaluable in terms of their ability to simplify complexmeasurement constructs, to focus attention and to catch the eye, thusenhancing their political appeal.     

India’s Social Development in a Decade of Reforms: 1990–91/1999–2000

The economic reforms initiated in India in 1991 have brought about visible upliftment of economic conditions of the country. This paper examines if the economic process is associated with an enhancement of India’s social development in equal measure in the reform decade of nineties. Ray (1989) considered thirteen social indicators of India and constructed the country’s social development index (SDI) as a certain weighted average of the selected indicators, for the years between 1950–51 and 1975–76. The present work broadly follows Ray (1989) in tracking the social development in the decade of economic reforms from 1990–91 to 1999–2000. The movement of SDI in nineties has been compared with the movements of India’s per capita income and plan expenditure on the social sector. The results show that though there has been growth in the social sector, it is not by far quite encouraging and perhaps more needs to be done in the social sector. The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not of the institution he serves.     

The level of civilisation a new field for the application of social indicators

Social indicators have been recognised for some time as a means of measuring various facets of social life which were difficult to quantify, such as level of living, environment conditions and the quality of life. It is proposed here that they should also be applied to the most important of them all, and namely to the quality of the society itself. Quality of society is the outcome of society's development, it may be seen as a level of civilisation, i.e. a position on a scale between vile barbarism and highest civilisation. This position may be given a numerical expression in terms of social indicators. A suggestion for constructing such a system of indicators is presented in this paper.     

A DEA Approach to Measure the Quality-of-Life in the Municipalities of the Canary Islands

The notion of the quality of life has always intrigued economists, sociologists and other researchers in the area of social science. Since the genesis of the definition of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a truthful measure of well-being and economic development, other sophisticated methodologies have been proposed in the literature to measure the quality-of-life (QOL) that extend in a multidimensional way this complex concept. Measuring QOL in municipalities consists in finding a set of comparable attributes that can be weighted by some metric in order to construct a synthetic index. Thus, the narrow vision obtained by a single measure as the GDP, in which differences in the QOL cannot be fully analyzed, is overcome. Based upon a refinement of data envelopment analysis (DEA)—the cross-efficiency method, the current paper develops a synthetic QOL index that is based in 19 partial indicators which present the tradeoffs of different dimension for the 87 municipalities of the Canary Islands in Spain. Marginal rates of substitution are calculated to evaluate the tradeoffs on QOL dimensions. A method is also proposed to determine the scores chart of each municipality which can be used as a tool to policy makers in order to establish a program of improving the ranking position of the municipality identifying the critical QOL factors.     

Composite Indices of Development and Poverty: An Application to MDGs

The measurement of development or poverty as multidimensional phenomena is very difficult because there are several theoretical, methodological and empirical problems involved. The literature of composite indicators offers a wide variety of aggregation methods, all with their pros and cons. In this paper, we propose a new, alternative composite index denoted as MPI (Mazziotta-Pareto Index) which, starting from a linear aggregation, introduces penalties for the countries or geographical areas with ‘unbalanced’ values of the indicators. As an example of application of the MPI, we consider a set of indicators in order to measure the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and we present a comparison between HDI (Human Development Index) methodology, HPI (Human Poverty Index) methodology and MPI.     

人口发展指标体系和穆斯林民族人口发展状态分析

研究民族发展和民族繁荣,需要有测度发展和繁荣方法,本文构建了衡量人口发展水平的指标体系,并用它来测度和分析穆斯林民族的发展状态,指出与中国其他民族相比,当前影响穆斯林民族人口发展的主要是人口年龄结构、城镇化和教育。     

The Socioemotional Well-Being Index (SEWBI): Theoretical Framework and Empirical Operationalisation

This article presents the design, process of construction, content and validation of the Socioemotional Well-Being Index. This index is a composite indicator of subjective well-being, and has been designed with the aim of providing a measurement device for the sociological analysis of the subjective components of quality of life and social quality. Two spheres of knowledge have been combined in its construction: research in social indicators, the recent development of which has been oriented toward the elaboration of composite indicators, and the theoretical content developed in recent decades by the sociology of emotions. As a composite indicator, the index presented in this article offers a hierarchical and multidimensional alternative to the univariate scales measuring happiness and satisfaction most often used in social research. In addition, in comparison to measures of subjective well-being grounded in cognitive evaluations, this index is based on the evaluation of a series of emotional states recently experienced by individuals. The conceptual definition of socioemotional well-being is based on Thomas Kemper’s social interactional theory of emotions and Randall Collins’ theory of interaction ritual chains. A “4 factor, 10 variable” solution has been obtained by applying common factor analysis to the data of the European Social Survey, 2006.     

Ranking and Prioritization of Emergency Departments Based on Multi-indicator Systems

In this work we discuss how Emergency Departments (EDs) can be ranked on the basis of multiple indicators. This problem is of absolute relevance due to the increasing importance of EDs in regional healthcare systems and it is also complex as the number of indicators that have been proposed in the literature to measure ED performance is very high. Current literature faces this problem using synthetic (or numerically aggregated) indicators of a set of performance measures but, although simple, this solution has a number of drawbacks that make this choice inefficient: a compensation effect among the indicators; a high degree of subjectivism in the indicators weighting; opacity in the decision making; all the EDs are considered to be comparable. Indeed, the situations in which EDs are comparable (i.e. when all the performance of one ED are not lower than the performance indicators of the other) are a minority and incomparability is by itself a source of information that should be used to identify situations for which different policy actions should be designed. In this work we propose to use non compensatory composite indicators and partial ordering theory to rank and compare EDs giving value to the reasons of such an incomparability. These methods are applied on a case study of 19 EDs in an administrative region in Italy.     

Measurement of socio-economic inequality using the Life-Quality Index

As income inequality presents a narrow view of overall inequality prevailing in a society, the paper focuses on its much broader definition, referred to as socio-economic inequality, which considers the disparities in income as well as in mortality, and standard of living. The paper presents a new method for measuring the socio-economic inequality using a composite social indicator, Life-Quality Index, derived from two principal indicators of development, namely, the Real Gross Domestic Product per person and the life expectancy at birth. Income inequality and the associated life expectancy variations are integrated into a quality adjusted income (QAI), to account for the observed differentials in life-quality of various quintiles of the population. The Gini coefficient of the distribution of QAI is introduced as a measure of socio-econmic inequality. The proposed approach is illustrated using data on life expectancy of five income quintiles in urban Canada. It is found that the magnitude of inequality in Canada is higher than that reflected by the traditional measure, the Gini coefficient of income.     

Media Use and Satisfaction with Democracy: Testing the Role of Political Interest

An interesting measure for equitable and sustainable well-being has been proposed recently by the National Institute of Statistics in Italy and the National Council for Economy and Labour. It is called BES (from the Italian Benessere Equo e Sostenibile). A set of indicators, partitioned into several domains and themes, is used for measuring the BES. Taking into account prior knowledge of both the structure of this set of indicators and the relationships among them, the paper proposes a hierarchical composite model for measuring and modeling the BES of the Italian provinces. This hierarchical model allows us to synthesize individual indicators into single indexes in order to construct composite indicators at a global and a partial level. Moreover, we analyze the relationships among the different domains and themes as well as the effects of these on equitable and sustainable well-being, in order to search for strongly influential factors. In order to estimate the parameters of the model, we use both Partial Least Squares path modeling and a new method, called Quantile Composite-based path modeling. In particular, Partial Least Squares path modeling is used to estimate average effects in the network of relationships between variables, while with Quantile Composite-based path modeling we investigate whether the magnitude of these effects changes across different parts of the variable distributions, providing a more complete picture and uncovering specific local leveraging factors for improvement. A final ranking of the Italian provinces, according to the BES composite indicator, is also provided at the national level and for different geographic areas of Italy.     

Construct Validation and Application of a Common Measure of Social Cohesion in 33 European Countries

The aim of the paper is to assess the construct validation of a multidimensional measure of social cohesion which is well theoretically grounded and has an equivalent/comparable interpretation across all European countries. Up-to-now published research on social cohesion is deficient in either one or both of these important aspects. This paper attempts to cover this gap. The task is accomplished in two steps. In the first step, we conceptualize social cohesion, flowing mainly from Bernard and Chan’s definitions of social cohesion. Based on this theoretical framework we operationalize social cohesion and derive a set of intermediate indicators in the data. By return we verify whether these indicators empirically reflect/corroborate the multidimensional structure of the concept proposed by the theory. In the second step, we examine whether the obtained intermediate indicators of social cohesion form the same constructs across countries and whether they can yield a cross country equivalent measure of social cohesion. To test the validity of the theory we use multidimensional scaling and confirmatory factor analysis. Both models are able to verify the equivalence of the structural results between groups (i.e. countries). Confirmatory factor analysis produces further meaningful measures of these constructs. The analyses are based on the data from the 1999 European Values Study (EVS). The outcomes of the analyses reveal that, firstly, the existence of the multifaceted construct of social cohesion suggested by the theory has been corroborated by empirical analysis of the EVS data (i.e. social cohesion consists of components of formal and substantial relationships and political and socio-cultural domains). Secondly, the proposed constructs measuring social cohesion are equivalent across all analysed countries and thus allow the calculation of internationally comparable national scores of social cohesion. Application of the aggregate measures at the country level will illustrate the interest of the approach for further research.     

Measuring World Better Life Frontier: A Composite Indicator for OECD Better Life Index

The OECD Better Life initiative recently released a comprehensive set of 11 indicators of well-being covering a group of countries. Each individual indicator corresponds to a key topic that is essential to well-being. However, the problem of aggregating them is left to users of this dataset. Using these as individual indicators, we propose a composite indicator of overall well-being, which is intended to measure the performance of each country in terms of providing well-being to its people. The ‘benefit of the doubt’ approach (BOD), a well-known aggregation tool based on a weighed sum, assigns the most favourable weights for each entity under investigation. BOD may also be considered to evaluate the performance of each entity in terms of its efficiency. Regarding individual indicators as outputs, it constructs the benchmark production frontier from observed individual indicators. A composite indicator based on BOD equals the distance between each entity’s individual indicator and the production frontier, indicating its efficiency. It is widely considered that the well-being of a country’s people stems from its productive base, which is characterized by capital assets and social infrastructures. Thus, the productive base can be considered the input used to produce well-being, which is reflected by individual indicators. Therefore, when we apply BOD to aggregate individual well-being indicators across countries, we implicitly assume that all countries have the same productive base, as BOD addresses only the output and neglects the input. This inaccurate assumption leads to a distorted performance measure. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), in which BOD has its roots, is a tool to measure the efficiency of each entity by allowing for differences in inputs as well as outputs across entities. DEA also measures efficiency by using the distance to the production frontier; however, unlike BOD, DEA constructs the production frontier more accurately by utilizing the information of inputs as well as outputs, leading to a better performance measure. We apply DEA to aggregate 11 individual well-being indicators into a composite indicator using the World Bank’s estimates of each country’s productive base. The composite indicator based on BOD is distributed similarly to and is highly correlated with the existing Human Development Indicator (HDI). It is also positively correlated with GDP per capita. On the other hand, we show that the composite indicator based on DEA is negatively correlated with HDI as well as GDP per capita.