ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 dismissed welfare and related indicators as valid measures of social progress. This chapter looks now for more operational measures of “development.” It discusses popular concepts and indices of human development, sustainable development, prosperity, global competitiveness and development goals, and compares them to national income per capita and social welfare. The indices usually give equal weight to the underlying indicators. They generate different rankings of countries, agreeing only on the low development of the poorest African nations. Other less quantitative ways of comparing the indicators use visual aids of traffic lights, color codes or cobwebs; they reflect the judgments of “experts” who assign countries to qualitative classes of index levels.
