International Indicators of Development: an Overview

Introduction Until recent years a country’s aggregate output, or gross domestic product (GDP), was used almost exclusively as the primary measure of economic development. Both comparative (i.e. between countries) and over time, growth in GDP per capita was commonly used to describe changes in well-being. Recognizing the inadequacy of this measure of well-being , the United Nations began to devise and collect other macro-level quantitative measures of health, education, employment and housing in addition to real income data in the mid-1950’s. More explicit attempts at capturing human level wellbeing were made by M.D. Morris (1979) and more recently in the UN’s Human Development Index (DasGupta, 1993).