A value based index for measuring national quality of life

A new index of the quality of life (QOL) of nations was created. The measured variables are selected based on a universal set of human values derived from the work of Schwartz (1994). The Basic QOL Index, designed primarily to discriminate between developing countries, includes seven variables: purchasing power, homicide rate, fulfillment of basic physical needs, suicide rate, literacy rate, gross human rights violations, and deforestation. The Advanced QOL Index, designed primarily to assess QOL in highly industrialized nations, includes seven variables: physicians per capita, savings rate, per capita income, subjective well-being, percent attending college, income equality, and environmental treaties signed. Combining the two indices produced a reliable measure of QOL that systematically covers diverse human values. The nations scoring highest on the Combined QOL Index were Canada, Switzerland, Netherlands, U.S.A., and Norway, and those scoring lowest were Ethiopia and Rwanda.     

A Quality of Growth Index for Developing Countries: A Proposal

This paper proposes a new quality of growth index for developing countries. The index encompasses both the intrinsic nature and social dimensions of growth, and is computed for over 90 countries for the period 1990–2011. The approach is premised on the fact that not all growth is created equal in terms of social outcomes, and that it does matter how one reaches from one level of income to another for various theoretical and empirical reasons. The paper finds that the quality of growth has been improving in the vast majority of developing countries over the past two decades, although the rate of convergence is relatively slow. At the same time, there are considerable cross-country variations across income levels and regions. Finally, empirical investigations point to the fact that main factors of the quality of growth are political stability, public pro-poor spending, macroeconomic stability, financial development, institutional quality and external factors such as FDI.     

A Deprivation Analysis for Andalusia (Spain): An Approach Based on Structural Equations

The study of deprivation, as a social indicator, is basic in the design and development of public policies because it allows decision makers to identify and analyse needy areas in order to improve their citizens’ well-being. The methodological approach proposed for the development of a new deprivation index is based on the Causal Theory whose conceptual model is analysed using Structural Equations. The domains selected for the deprivation index are: education, employment, income, housing, infrastructures and health. A structural equation model based on variance is the exploratory method used to obtain the indices pertaining to the above mentioned areas; the results obtained are seen to be quite reliable. There is a positive connection between the areas of education, employment and income while the relations between infrastructures and health are found to be negative. The results can be projected at a local level and show basic territorial deficiencies. The spatial units studied are the Andalusian (south of Spain) municipalities (770). The spatial projection of the indices obtained for the domains of deprivation highlights the existence of geographical areas which could be a potential target for public action.     

A Household-Based Distribution-Sensitive Human Development Index: An Empirical Application to Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru

In measuring human development, one of the main concerns relates to the inclusion of a measure that penalizes inequalities in the distribution of achievements across the population. Using indicators from nationally representative household surveys and census data, this paper proposes a straightforward methodology to estimate a household-based distribution-sensitive human development index aggregated through generalized means. The evidence shows that the losses in human development due to inequality reach up 22, 29 and 57% in Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua, respectively. Among dimensions, the loss in the income index reaches up 61% in Nicaragua, while the education index appears as the most sensitive in the case of Mexico and Peru, with a percentage of loss between 38 and 48%. The importance of household-level calculations is highlighted when we compare the indices computed from the entire distribution with those existing indices computed for quintiles of the distribution, which minimizes the losses due to inequality. Overall, the estimations evidence a higher sensitivity of the index to inequality, and therefore an important space for public action to reduce inequality that could involve positive development returns.     

Relative Economic Position and Subjective Well-Being in a Poor Society: Does Relative Position Indicator Matter?

Concern for relative income (or status in general) may have important implications for poverty and individual well-being. This paper examines the impact of relative economic position on individual’s level of well-being among poor communities in rural Ethiopia. The analysis uses a self-reported measure of overall life-evaluation as a measure of individual well-being. Despite the fact that well-being is multidimensional, the impact of non-money metric measures of relative economic position on individual well-being has not been given a lot of attention in the literature. In this study, relative economic position is measured using consumption data, asset index, and respondent’s own perception of relative wealth. The asset index captures the non-monetary dimensions of economic welfare, including education, physical assets, and social capital. We use data from the 2004 and 2009 waves of the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey and employ a multilevel modelling technique to account for individual and group level heterogeneity in our empirical analysis. We find no significant relationship between individual well-being and relative economic position measured with in consumption terms. In contrast, we do find a significant negative impact of relative position on individual well-being when we use asset indices and respondent’s own perception of relative wealth to measure relative economic position. Our findings suggest that when individuals compare themselves with others, they evaluate various aspects of their life, including their financial conditions, asset holdings, and social relations, which are hardly captured by consumption or income data in many poor countries.     

On the measurement of certain aspects of social development

An attempt has been made in this paper to measure social development. There has been some limited use of per capita national income as a measure of development. A number of social indicators from various societal areas may, alternatively, better represent social development of a region. A composite index of selected social indicators has been proposed as a measure of social development. Certain existing methods of construction of composite indexes have been examined and new methods proposed using the variance-covariance matrix and intercorrelation matrix of the indicators and the concept of (Euclidean) distance. Two examples of intertemporal and international comparisons have been presented to illustrate the proposed methods.The author is grateful to Prof. M. Mukherjee under whose supervision and guidance this work was carried out. However, the views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not of the institution to which he belongs.     

The European Gender Equality Index: Conceptual and Analytical Issues

This article presents a composite indicator designed to measure and compare existing structural gender equality in the countries of the European Union. The construction of an index is always a complex task which requires making a great many important conceptual, analytical and empirical decisions. This complexity explains the wide variety of gender equality indices created during the last 25?years. All the proposed indices attempt to measure the same thing, gender (in)equality, but none of them define the concept they want to measure in exactly the same way, nor do they operationalize measurement in the same manner. Taking into account the methodology of these preceding approaches, this article explains the basis for the most important analytical and conceptual decisions made in constructing the European Gender Equality Index. The article also includes the overall scores obtained by the 27 European countries on this index, on its three basic dimensions (education, work and power), and on the eighteen indicators that make up its structure. With this data, corresponding to 2009, an adequate analysis of gender equality in Europe can be established.     

The Cost of Well-Being

It is by now common knowledge that in switching from GDP to alternative, multidimensional, measures of collective well-being one can provide a better account of a country’s socio-economic conditions. Such a gain, however, comes at the price of losing output-to-input type of link between well-being and the resources necessary to make it available. Since well-being measures are not meant to be only an exercise in documentation, but also to inform policies and priorities, we propose a method to build a measure of well-being in the form of a single index, as for GDP, which takes into account: (1) the social and environmental costs, not considered in the GDP, and (2) the use of conventional resources (capital and labour), not considered in the currently available multidimensional measures of well-being. We use a Data Envelopment Analysis type of model, integrated with Principal Component Analysis, to evaluate OECD countries’ relative efficiency in providing well-being. Our results show that the costs of producing well-being have a large and significant impact on the resulting index of well-being. Therefore, high efficiency in providing well-being and high income cannot be considered a proxy to each other. In addition, it is shown that countries react differently to the different costs of well-being: poor countries are, on average, more efficient in terms of conventional inputs (labour and capital), while rich countries have higher efficiency indices relative to social and environmental costs. The close to zero correlation between GDP and well-being indices for rich countries provides new support to the “Easterlin paradox”.     

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.     

The Family Affluence Scale as a Measure of National Wealth: Validation of an Adolescent Self-Report Measure

One explanation for a lack of consistency in SES-health associations in youth is that parent-based income and occupation measures are inadequate. The Family Affluence Scale (FAS), a four-item measure of family wealth, has been developed in the WHO Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study as an alternative measure. The aim of this paper is to examine the criterion and construct validity of the FAS as a measure of national absolute wealth in 35 countries. A general measure of national wealth, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the year 2001, corrected for Purchasing Power Parity, was used as a gold standard. For the composite FAS index, there was a similar strength in country rank order correlation (0.87) as with GDP, and a Kappa agreement coefficient of 0.57, indicating good criterion validity. FAS index associations with national health indicators were systematically higher than the values obtained with GDP. These features suggest that FAS can be used with confidence in aggregate analyses of HBSC data that focus on relationships between SES and adolescent health.     

Corruption and the ‘Paradox of Redistribution’

The existing literature on the determinants of income redistribution has identified a ‘paradox’. Namely, that countries with a high degree of market income inequality redistribute little, which is in disagreement with the median voter theorem. In a first step, this paper outlines several mechanisms that explain why government corruption might be partially responsible for this ‘paradox’. In a second step, different corruption perception indices and an instrumental variable approach are used to provide empirical evidence that indicates a significant negative impact of corruption on redistribution levels for a sample of 148 developing and developed countries. This finding suggests that, next to political and need factors, government corruption explains to some extent the ‘paradox of redistribution’. This is especially true for many developing countries, given that they typically have relatively high degrees of corruption and low levels of redistribution.     

Poverty,Inequality and Deprivation in South Africa: An Analysis of the 1993 SALDRU Survey

This paper analyses poverty and inequality in South Africa based on data from a comprehensive multi-purpose household survey undertaken in 1993 to provide baseline statistics on poverty and its determinants to the new government. The paper shows that South Africa has among the highest levels of income inequality in the world and compares poorly in most social indicators to countries with similar income levels. Much of the poverty in the country is a direct result of apartheid policies that denied equal access to education, employment, services, and resources to the black population of the country. As a result, poverty has a very strong racial dimension with poverty concentrated among the African population. In addition, poverty is much higher in rural areas, and particularly high in the former homelands. Poverty among female-headed households and among children is also higher than average. Moreover, poverty is closely related to poor education and lack of employment. The poor suffer from lack of access to education, quality health care, basic infrastructure, transport, are heavily indebted, have little access to productive resources, and are heavily dependent on remittances and social transfers, particularly social pensions and disability grants. The paper uses an income-based definition of poverty for most of the analysis. In addition, it develops a broad-based index of deprivation including income, employment, wealth, access to services, health, education, and perceptions of satisfaction as its components. While on average the two indicators correspond fairly closely, the income poverty measure misses a considerable number of people who are severely deprived in many of the non-income measures of well-being. This group of severely deprived not identified by the income poverty measure consists predominantly of Africans living in rural areas, concentrated particularly in the province of KwaZulu/Natal.     

International Migration and Human Development in Destination Countries: A Cross-National Analysis of Less-Developed Countries, 1970–2005

Contemporary levels of international migration in less-developed countries are raising new and important questions regarding the consequences of immigration for human welfare and well-being. However, there is little systematic cross-national evidence of how international migration affects human development levels in migrant-receiving countries in the less-developed world. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by assessing the impact of cumulative international migration flows on the human development index, a composite measure of aggregate well-being. A series of panel models are estimated using a sample of less-developed countries for the period, 1970–2005. The results indicate that higher levels of international migration are associated with lower scores on the human development index, net of controls, but that the effect of international migration is relatively small.     

Deprivation index for small areas in Spain

The term deprivation is often used to refer to economic or social shortages in a given geographical area. This concept of deprivation has been identified for years using simple indicators such as income level, education and social class. One of the advantages of using simple indicators is the availability of data, since they come directly from sources of information like censuses and population registers. However, the main disadvantage of these indicators is their limited usefulness when measuring a concept as complex as deprivation with a single variable. One possible solution to this problem is using compound indices, made up of a combination of simple indicators. For years, the concept of material deprivation in Spain has been measured using indices or indicators imported from other countries. However, there are no studies that investigate if all of these variables are really related to material deprivation in Spain. In this context, the objective of this study is to create a synthetic index for material deprivation for the municipalities in Spain, bearing in mind the variables available from the Population and Housing Census. The index was built on a principal components factor analysis. The analysis showed two factors. The first factor showed a high positive correlation to the variables relating to illiteracy rate, unemployment rate and percentage of manual labourers, while the second factor was seen as highly positively correlated to the variables relating to the percentage of homes without access to a vehicle and the dependency index and also correlated, though negatively, to the percentage of foreigners between 16 and 49 who lived abroad in 1991. The variables that make up the first factor can be considered to be an approximation of the concept of deprivation in Spain. This study proposes a deprivation index made up of three simple indicators available from national information sources: percentage of illiteracy, percentage of unemployment and percentage of manual labourers. With this index, the criteria for measuring deprivation in Spanish municipalities can be unified and a comparison of the results of the different studies in our context facilitated.     

Measuring the Success of Sustainable Development Indices in Terms of Reporting by the Global Press

A variety of indices have been applied to the performance of nation states, both for research and as aids to help guide policy and intervention. While the literature on indices is extensive, the focus to date has been almost entirely on technical issues of index creation. However the success of an index is arguably related at least in part to the use of that index by policy makers and managers. While cause-effect can be difficult to determine, one approach is to measure ‘success’ in terms of the reporting of indices by an intermediary group such as the media, and this paper assesses the reporting of 24 indices by newspapers worldwide until 2012. The results suggest that index success is influenced by a number of factors, including the time it has existed, its focus, extent and quality of publicity, adaptability in terms of the scope for others to change the content and methodology of the index and resonance in terms of the match with ideas/culture/behaviour of people. The paper makes a case for a new research field that seeks to investigate the meaning and factors involved in ‘success’ of indices and how these should help with index development.     

A demographic perspective on the Muslim world

A demographic perspective is relevant to understanding the position of Muslims in today’s world. This paper examines the size and growth of Muslim populations, and whether most Muslims live in overwhelmingly Muslim countries. It also examines indices of poverty and human development for Muslimmajority countries, and the growth of the youth population; finally, it examines the key components of population growth: mortality and fertility. Mortality has declined sharply over the past 15 years in many Muslim countries, though not in all, and Muslim countries are no longer prominent among the ‘outliers’ with higher mortality than expected on the basis of their income levels. Fertility rates are also declining sharply in a number of major Muslim-majority countries, raising interesting issues about attitudes of different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, village-level religious leaders and ordinary Muslims towards contraception and abortion, as well as the role of socio-economic development and family planning programs in fertility declines. Despite these declines, past high fertility in many Muslim-majority countries leaves as a legacy a rapidly growing adolescent population and a burgeoning, inadequately educated labour force.     

First Order Dominance Techniques and Multidimensional Poverty Indices: An Empirical Comparison of Different Approaches

In this empirically driven paper we compare the performance of two techniques in the literature of poverty measurement with ordinal data: multidimensional poverty indices and first order dominance techniques (FOD). Combining multiple scenario simulated data with observed data from 48 Demographic and Health Surveys around the developing world, our empirical findings suggest that the FOD approach can be implemented as a useful robustness check for ordinal poverty indices like the multidimensional poverty index (MPI; the United Nations Development Program’s flagship poverty indicator) to distinguish between those country comparisons that are sensitive to alternative specifications of basic measurement assumptions and those which are not. To the extent that the FOD approach is able to uncover the socio-economic gradient that exists between countries, it can be proposed as a viable complement to the MPI with the advantage of not having to rely on many of the normatively binding assumptions that underpin the construction of the index.     

The Importance of Variables in Composite Indices: A Contribution to the Methodology and Application to Development Indices

The paper examines the issue of weights and importance in composite indices of development. Building a composite index involves several steps, one of them being the weighting of variables. The nominal weight assigned to a variable often differs from the degree to which the variable affects the scores of the overall index. The newly suggested notion of importance is based on the idea that an important indicator, if omitted from the index, causes large changes in countries’ results. We propose a method of measuring the importance and apply it to inequality variables in composite indices of development. The results show a low importance for most inequality variables, and for some of them, a large discrepancy between the nominal weights and the importance. We argue that the importance of variables should be considered in the process of index construction. This may imply a modification of the index when there is a large discrepancy between the nominal weights and importance and when the importance of some variables is extremely low. Whether any such modification is justified must be decided within the context of the particular index.

     

The Europe 2020 Index

This paper presents a new index to quantify, measure and monitor the progress towards the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. This index is based on a set of relevant, accepted, credible, easy to monitor and robust indicators presented by the European Commission at the time the strategy was launched. The internal analysis of the index shows that the Smart and the Inclusive growth dimensions of the strategy are strictly correlated and that the trade-offs between each of these two dimensions and the Sustainable one exist but are decreasing, suggesting that a change towards more sustainable models of development is occurring in Europe. The external analysis of the index shows that it can be a valid measure to assess the overall competitiveness of countries and that the most critical factors for this strategy to be successful are good governance and social capital.     

Some comments on ‘the structure of subjective well-being in nine western societies’ by andrews and inglehart

This paper makes a number of critical comments on a recent article by Andrews and Inglehart (1979), where the similarity of subjective well-being data from nine different countries was investigated. It is first shown that different MDS representations can be constructed for the data which differ considerably among each other and with respect to the similarity hypothesis. The goodness of the MDS solutions is discussed by using finer indices than overall Stress. Then, the measures of configurational similarity are evaluated statistically. Finally, it is shown that other, equally valid measures lead to completely different conclusions. It is argued that this poses an insurmountable problem. A facet theoretical approach which looks for prototypical structures rather than a single similarity index avoids this dilemma.