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Measuring Development
Ch. 3, Greig et. al.
Developmental Statistics
• Statistics are always problematic, but are equally necessary.
• Economy
– GDP (goods and services produced)
– GNP (GDP plus income from abroad mainly from
property and workers’ remittances)
– GDP or GNI per capita: (GDP/GNP divided by mid year
population).
– World Development Report (by the World Bank)
• Low Income
• Lower middle income
• Upper middle income
• High Income (OECD countries)
GDP and GNP
But the GDP or GNI figures do not represent real price levels. What you
can buy with US1$ in Switzerland is far less than in Bangladesh or
Egypt. The statisticians take into account international differences in
relative prices to produce a device called purchasing power parity .
• But what about :
• Inequality within nations?
• A further problem with GNI and GDP per capita is that they
principally capture market activity. This means it mainly registers
economic activity where money change hands.
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What about unpaid labor?
“underground economy”?
Illicit drug trade
Ethical issues (environmental degradation – GDP per capita can
place socially destructive activities on the positive side of the
financial ledger). P. 34.
Developmental Statistics
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Society
– Demographics
• Population growth rates(lower income nations experienced higher
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population growth).
Demographic transition: (experienced by industrialized nations:
low birth rate, low mortality rate).
Life expectancy p.35
Education (universal primary school education)
Urbanization
Composite measures of development
– HDI (Human Development Index)
• Introduced by the UNDP in 1990
• Scale 0-1
• Norway the highest by 0.944 and Sierra Leone the lowest by 0.275
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(2001)
High, medium, low
Table 3.1
Units of Analysis
• The nation-state as a unit of analysis
– Methodological territorialism
– In recent decades more holistic focus on global system, although
controversial
– Nouns to describe poorer countries
– Third World, LDCs, etc. (see Box 3.2, p. 42)
• The problem with a collective identity
– Underemphasizes differences
– Heterogeneity of poor countries
• The value of a collective identity
– Subjective identification
– Non-Aligned Movement (‘third force’)
The Language of Development
• Labelling has always been a difficult task.
• Third World (post-Second World War period)
• South or Global South
(adopted to overcome problems with the label
‘Third World’)
• Cold War’s East-West division is now replaced by
a North-South division (rich vs. poor).