prosperity, indices

Sun, 5 May 1996 09:12:14 -0700 (PDT)
Jozsef Borocz (jborocz@orion.oac.uci.edu)

Don't the United Nations Development Program's _Human Development
Reports_ do just what you are looking for? (Provide a set of measures
pertaining to non-business related aspects of the quality of life. I seem
to remember very interesting tables in the first, (I think 1993) edition,
comparing country rankings based on literacy, life expectancy, completed
years of schooling, % of female children completing elementary and
highschool, etc. with rankings based on various measures of national output,
particularly the purchasing power parity and current exchange rate
estimates of gross national domestic product.)

>From the former set, they then go on creating something called HDI (human
development index) and its rankings are contrasted with GDP rankings (they
subtract the latter from the former). The outcome is predictable: the
former state socialist countries, along with a few European post-war
Marshall aid-recipient welfare state democracies stand out on the
positive extreme; the remainder of the core countries (the U.S. included)
and much of the "third world" in the middle with enormous variance, and
the oil-rich "third world" countries (whose GDP figures are boosted
enormously by the oil revenues that somehow do not exactly appear to be
redistributed :-() are trailing the rest of the world. This (subtracting
rankings) is a statistically somewhat sloppy way of presenting the
data--I guess they must have decided to do it this way to make it
understandable for a lay audience. (After all, most of their readership
is politicians.) :-(

BTW, two interesting asides. The first edition received serious
political criticism (from governments whose countries which did not
appear in as favorable ligth as they had expected). Consequently, the UN
general assembly distanced itself from the report and insisted that this
was a UNDP research result and not a political document.

Second, for the second edition, the HDI was revised such that it would
not reflect negatively on some important nations. Which the most important
such nation was, I will not say. I will, however, give two hints: it is that
same nation which (1) due to the singificance of its economy, is supposed
to pay 1/4 of the entire UN budget and (2) has back dues for four years,
forcing the world organization to borrow from its peace keeping budget to
sustain its operations.

(BTW, I hear the entire budget of the world organization, net of peace
keeping, is smaller than that of the New York Police Department. I also
hear the UN is operating on emergency funding and is just about to go
bankrupt. Who I hear these things from? Well, a couple of friends who
work for the UN as economists. This is all supported, however, by none
other than Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Secretary General [see: _New York
Times_, a few days ago].)

Best,

Jozsef (Borocz)

virtually: at the University of California, Irvine
in reality: Dept of Sociology, Rutgers University