Development is the progress of a country in terms of economic growth, the use of technology and human welfare; with the aim of improving people’s lives.
How can development be measured?
Development can be measured using different social and economic indicators.
Social Indicators
Birth Rate - The number of births per 1000 people per year.
Death Rate - The number of deaths per 1000 people per year.
Access to Safe Water - The % of the population that have access to clean drinking water that is unpolluted, disease free and safe to drink.
Life Expectancy - The average age that a person is expected to live to.
People per Doctor - The average number of patients that each available doctor is responsible for.
Literacy Rate - The % of the population that can read or write over the age of 15.
Infant Mortality - The number of children who die before the age of 1 per 1000 live births.
Economic Indicators
GNI per head - The total value of the goods and services produced by a country in a year. It is expressed as per head (per capita) of the population.
Combined Social & Economic Indicators
Human Development Index (HDI) - A score from 0 to 1 that incorporates life expectancy, access to education and GNI per head.
What are the limitations of social and economic indicators?
Using a single measure of development can be misleading because it is an average for the country and does not show variations within the country. For example, in Saudi Arabia the GNI is high but most of the money is held by a very few extremely rich people.
A single measure might just consider income and nothing else. Combined measures such as HDI are better as they take into account both economic indicators such as income and social indicators such as education levels.
Some aspects of development change before others, such as death rate which falls before birth rate, so if you just looked at death rate you would not really be able to tell the stage of development of a country.
They only focus on certain aspects of development and may not take into account subsistence or informal economies which are important in many countries.
Government corruption may mean that data is unreliable.
Data can be out of date or hard to collect.
Data may be unreliable (for example, infant mortality in some locations is often much higher than figures given).