ABSTRACT
The woes of the statistician appear to be trivial compared to those of the economist attempting to measure social welfare in terms of Gross Domestic Product (gdp) indices. It is obvious that although gdp and per capita income figures may measure overall growth performance of economy, they indicate little or nothing about the distribution of the product within the community. In most developing countries, growth has resulted in some improvement in the economic well-being of their citizens in general. The conventional yardstick of economic performance is the annual average rate of growth of national product, but whether a particular rate of growth is high or low can only be adjudged with reference to an assumed 'norm'. The high growth rates for individual years in the 1970s were mostly due to favourable weather conditions which resulted in appreciable increases in agricultural output.
