An Economic Development Index

Alvaro Montenegro

Development and Comp Systems from EconWPA

Abstract: There is no consensus about which variables, apart from income per capita, serve to characterize or define economic development, or guide its teaching. This paper proposes a simple and operational definition that combines the level of income per capita and the distribution of income. An economic development index is then constructed and used to rank a sample of countries from the well-known Deininger and Squire database. The results differ, significantly in some cases, from rankings produced by the United Nations' Human Development Index and the GDP per capita.

Keywords: economic development; indices; income distribution; HDI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
Date: 2004-04-20
Note: Type of Document - doc; pages: 23. Microsoft Word 2000

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