Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dr. L. N. Bhattarai
Professor of Economics
Types of Indicators
• Single Indicators:
– Real GDP/ GNP
– Real Per Capita Income
– Real consumption per Capita
– Productivity per capita
– General literacy/Adult literacy rate
– Life expectancy at Birth
– Rate of Urbanizaiton/ percentage of People living in
urban areas.
– CBR/ CDR etc.
Composite indices of
Development
• Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI)
• Human Development Indices (HDIs)
• Gross National Happiness Index (GNHI)
Physical Quality of Life Index
• The Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) is an attempt to
measure the quality of life or well-being of a country. The value is
the average of three statistics: basic literacy rate, infant
mortality, and life expectancy at age one, all equally weighted on
a 0 to 100 scale.
• It was developed for the Overseas Development Council in the
mid-1970s by Morris David Morris, as one of a number of
measures created due to dissatisfaction with the use of GNP as
an indicator of development.
• PQLI might be regarded as an improvement but shares the
general problems of measuring quality of life in a quantitative
way.
• It has also been criticized because there is considerable overlap
between infant mortality and life expectancy
The Human Development Indices
The HDI
Calculating the HDI: an example (Zambia)
Life Education index
expectancy Income
index
Literacy
(2/3)
Enrolment
(1/3) index HDI
85 years 1 100% 100% 1 40,000 1 1
78.1 0.68
49 0.433
780 0.34
41.4 0.27
25 years 0 0% 0% 0 100 0 0
(log scale)