On Mon, 6 May 1996 gehrig@banyan.doc.gov wrote:
> > 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 indices show _eastern europe, russia, and cuba_ as having higher
> standards of living???
I guest this only shows that one should only look into the mirror if one
is willing to accept what the mirror will show.
Before the stuff you are quoting from me (above), I think I explained in
my original message how these computations were made. I will only
summarize here. GDP/cap rankings were subtracted from "Human Development
Index" rankings. If your country was #1 in GDP/cap and #1 in HDI, you get a
score of 0. You also get a score of 0 if your country is 15th in GDP/cap and
15th in HDI. The same if your country is 237th on both measures. Now,
here comes the interesting stuff. If your country was higher in HDI
ranking than in GDP/cap ranking, you get a positive number (that's
"good": in the UNDP's thinking, that indicates that your society
translates its material resources into human life quality "better" than
others); if your GDP/cap ranking is higher than your HDI, that is "bad",
i.e., the opposite, etc.
In these terms, I don't think it's so difficult for anybody to see how Cuba
could show, with its near-full literacy, state-run immunization
campaigns, etc., better results than its neighbors with the same GDP/cap,
for instance. After all, state socialism was, in the peripheral context
particularly, a major, state-run industrial modernization project.
Literacy, health and hygiene measures, education, etc. are all components of
that. I don't see what there is to be surprised about. These are not
measures of popular extacy about the system.
> socialized w. european economies?? Does anyone assert that these
> countries have higher standards now? If not, what does this imply
> about the measure?
If you re-read my original message, I insisted that this was a very
problematic method of presenting the data. There are better ways.
Now, it is a separate question to adjudicate the extent to which life
expectancy at birth is a good or bad measure of the quality of life in a
society. Is the literacy rate a good measure or a bad one? I don't know:
I would need to know the purpose to be able to comment on the usefulness
of those measures. All I said in my posting was that the specialized
branch of the world organization seems to have thought that those were
"good." I suspect they thought so for a reason. For instance these are
relatively readily available measures. They are also robust. They are
little-prone to systematic falsification on the local data reporting
level. There are probably other good reasons that I can't think of right
now.
BTW, these tables are all widely available for perusal in the UNDP Human
Development Reports: if you feel like it, you can easily plot the various
quality of life measures against the GDP scores. You can fit a regression
line and see which countries fall one standard deviation higher / lower
than their "expected value". I suspect you would get pretty much the same
substantive result as I described. You can procede and add other control
variables and see if you can reduce the distance of those outliers. It
would be an interesting exercise.
If you do that, my sense is that you would get the same result even today,
with state socialism gone, except probably with greater magnitudes as the
GDPs of the post-state-socialist countries are, with one or two
exceptions, steeply falling while at least some quality of life measures
(e.g., educational attainment, etc.) will take at least one generation to
correct (downwards, where they "belong"). The IMF, with its structural
adjustment axe aimed precisely at the educational and health care
delivery systems of these societies, also helps in rectifying that
anomaly. 8-(
> To me, it goes back to the Living Standards index
> on the Penn world database: Resources were transfered from
> producers to consumers, helping them in the short run but damaging
> future consumption because of declining investment.
The relevancy (and to a certain extent the meaning) of this sentence
escapes me. Please rephrase.
Jozsef