Pairwise Comparisons of Social Development of Selected Countries: 1960–1994: An application of D2-statistics

The paradigm of development has shifted from gross national product to human well-being: from economic growth to social development. It has been broadly accepted that economic growth doesnot automatically translate into a better quality of life. Consequently, the main objective of the most of the countries is to achieve better standard of living for their people. In this context it is of interest to have a look at the pairwise convergence or divergence of countries in social development over a period of time. This study uses D²-statistics to obtain a pairwise distance matrix for the sample countries for each point of time 1960 and 1994. The paper presents a gap matrix portraying the change in the distances between each pair of country over the period. This also finds distance of a country from all other countries. All the analysis has been offered for the entire sample as well as three income groups low, middle and high.