The Resource-Infrastructure-Environment Index for Measuring Progress: An Application to Australia, Mexico and the US

The resource-infrastructure-environment (RIE) index was proposed as an alternative measure of progress which was then employed to: (1) compare the aggregate (single summary) index findings between Australia (mid-industrialised nation), Mexico (emerging economy), and the US (highly industrialised nation); and (2) compare the RIE index against the gross domestic product (GDP), human development index (HDI) and genuine savings (GS) measure. This paper builds on the previous work by assessing the seven themes and 21 dimensions which comprise the RIE index for the three aforementioned nations, as well as the associated policy implications. The results identified Australia’s strength in the human resource and infrastructure themes. For Mexico, strong contributions came from the natural and generated resource themes as well as the physical environment theme, while the US performed strongly in the infrastructure themes. The comparative results of the US and Mexico illustrated that it is possible to achieve high levels of progress without an excessive reliance on high levels of production and income.     

Extreme quantiles and tail index of a distribution based on kernel estimator

In this paper, we reveal the relationship between the tail exponent introduced by Parzen (1979) and tail index for a distribution function. Furthermore, we analyze the domain of attraction of the weighted sum of the distributions and its tail index. We show that the extreme quantiles can estimate directly, through knowing only the tail index of the kernel distribution function used in estimating the distribution function. Moreover, we give a smoothing parameter of extreme quantiles, which does not depend on any distribution function. The simulations and the application to reals data show that the proposed smoothed parameter gives better results for a heavy-tailed distribution, and for small sizes sample in extremes level.     

Measuring Progress: A Comparison of the GDP,HDI, GS and the RIE

The current paper constructs a progress measurement appropriate for measuring multiple and different dimensions of progress. The paper is not meant to be a detailed discussion of the framework but rather a demonstrated application of the measure. The constructed resource-infrastructure-environment progress measure employs a non-monetary evaluation adopting a weighting technique based on public opinion. The proposed index is assessed from a single summary standpoint. The aggregation method is evaluated via a z-score standardisation technique. The progress index is applied to three countries that are representative of different clusters. They are Australia (mid-industrialised nation), Mexico (emerging economy), and the US (highly industrialised nation). These selected countries provide an opportunity to highlight any divergences that may exist in their perceived economic strength. The results showed Australia as consistently having the highest levels of progress, closely followed by Mexico and then the US.