Indicators for development and health Flashcards
Economic Indicator: GDP per capita
This is the income and taxes earned by a country’s citizens.
Economic indicator: GNP per capita
Economic Indicator: GNI per capita
This is income and taxes earned by a country’s citizens including that earned by citizens living abroad and overseas investment.
Economic Indicator: % employed in agriculture
In many developing countries, this is high. In Burkina and Chad have between 80-90% of working population employed in agriculture compared with the Uk’s 1%.
Social indicators: Population per doctor
Social Indicators: Adult literacy rates
Literacy levels reflects the ability to read and write. In the UK it is 99 per cent where as in Sierra Leone it is only 35 per cent. High levels indicates country has money to spend on schools, training teachers, buying materials. But it fails to show inequalities in gender.
Social Indicators: Life expectancy
how long a person is expected to live, reflects standard of living in a country. In the UK, average life expectancy is 78, and in Sierra Leone is less than 40
Social Indicators: Infant mortality rates
Number of children who die before first birthday per 1000 of population. Reflects level of healthcare avaliable in a country.
Composite indicators
a more reliable method of measuring a countries development, as they rely on two or more individual indicators which gives a fuller picture of the countries development.
Composite Indicator (PQLI)
Physical Quality of Life Index, is reliable as it isn’t about wealth. It doesn’t contain an economic indicator, it includes infant mortality rate, life expectancy and literacy rates.
Thought to be a good indicator as life expectancy and infant mortality reflect reflect other issues. It also draws your attention to small groups of really poor countries, for example, Chad.
Composite indicators (HDI)
Human Development Index, is more realistic than PQLI as HDI as it takes into account social and economic indicators such as PPP and life expectancy at birth. PQLI is less realistic as money does have an impact on a country’s development. In HDI each factor is given an value of between 0 and 1 and these are averaged to give an overall value for a country. HDI is a reliable indicator as it can show anomalies, for example, countries that have an better standards of living would be indicated by GNI e.g. Sri Lanka and those that have a poorer HDI than indicated by their GNI per capita e.g. Saudi Arabia.
Single indicators
Essentially single indicators are too broad/generalised and are averages which
disguise or distort wide internal variations e.g. urban v rural; male v female; north v
south.
Single indicators often hide wide variations within countries. For example, Saudi
Arabia performs well in economic development measures (GNP) because of the oil
industry/revenues, however wide inequalities exist between the rich and poor. For
example, in Brazil rural and urban areas differ greatly.
