Measuring Development

Question 1

Global development

Answer 1

Human development and international efforts to reduce poverty, inequality and improve health, education and job opportunities around the world.

Question 2

What is the main economic measure?

Answer 2

• Economic growth
• This refers to the monetary value of the country’s produce increase over time, relative to other countries.
• This usually means less production and more consuming over time.

Question 3

What are the three stages of the development of production?

Answer 3

• Subsistence (Can you feed your population) (Medieval)
• Mass production and consumption (Industrial)
• Service industries (Post-modern)

Question 4

What is economic development usually measured in?

Answer 4

• Gross national income per capita

- The total value of all goods and services produced by a country in a financial year.

Question 5

What are some examples of common social measures?

Answer 5

• Education
• Healthcare and longevity
• Democracy
• Gender equality
• Happiness and wellbeing
• Sustainability

Question 6

What are the two main humanist measures?

Answer 6

• Human development index

- Human development report

Question 7

What is the human development index?

Answer 7

• A composite measure that combines three things to produce a score.
• GNI per capita (economic consideration)
• Education (social consideration)
• Health (social consideration)

Question 8

What is the human development report?

Answer 8

• Focuses on amore humanist approach and looks in on equality and reducing poverty rather than a country’s economic or statistical success.

Question 9

What are the three indexes used in the HDR?

Answer 9

• Multidimensional poverty index (MPI)- looks at more kinds of poverty. Eg. living standards and education.
• Gender inequality index (GII)- measures female reproductive health, educational attainment and government representation.
• Inequality adjusted HDI (IHDI)- a total equality measure that’s directly compared against the HDI. The bigger the difference, the higher the score.

Question 10

Benefits of economic measures

Answer 10

• A key headline figure that’s ‘easily’ measured and comparable.
• Certain people would argue a strong economy will trickle down to other measures. (eg. social wellbeing)

Question 11

Drawbacks of economic measures

Answer 11

• Fast development is rarely sustainable economically and environmentally.
• A rise in GNI can also be accompanied by a rising crime rates and environmental degradation.
• Difficult to calculate GNI accurately and only counts what happens in the official economy.
• It doesn’t cover all aspects of social development.
• Conceals inequalities as GNI per capita is just the average for the whole population so it’s accuracy would be dependent on the income distribution.

Question 12

Benefits of humanist measures

Answer 12

• Useful in giving a broad impression of development and the links between the economy and social wellbeing.
• Reports in which the HDI are published have broadened the scope of development by covering, for example, human rights and political freedoms and sustainability.
• It combines different indicators of development to create a score for each country. This allows countries to be put in a rank order and help measure changes over time.

Question 13

Drawbacks of humanist measures

Answer 13

• Hyper humanism would potentially advocate for more radical and different measures and say that ‘traditional measures are flawed.’
• In many developing countries, there are doubts about the accuracy of some of the statistics used because of the difficulties in collecting data.
• Figures aren’t always available for all countries.
• It’s argued that not all important aspects of development can be measured quantitatively.