Development indicators Notes

What Do Development Indicators Describe?

1. The key thing you should internalize is development is multi-dimensional.
2. Income matters, but so do health, education, safety, opportunity, and the environment.
3. For that reason, we use both single indicators (one statistic at a time) and composite indicators (an index made from several measures).

What Do Single Indicators Indicate About Development?

1. A single indicator measures one aspect of development.
2. Single indicators are useful because they are concrete and easier to interpret, but they can be misleading if used alone.

Demographic indicators reflect family size and health risks

1. Many countries described as developing countries (often called LEDCs, less economically developed countries) share some common patterns linking to a lack of development, which also make development harder to achieve.
2. First, developing countries often have high birth rates.
3. Family size is influenced by:
   1. Household income and security
   2. Women's education levels
   3. Religious and cultural norms
   4. Access to contraception and family planning advice, and
   5. The availability of maternal support and healthcare.
4. High birth rates can increase pressure on schools, jobs, housing, and healthcare.
5. Developing countries also tend to have higher infant and maternal mortality rates.
6. The risk is increased when there are:
   1. Fewer doctors and trained midwives
   2. Births happen without medical supervision
   3. Infection control and sanitation are limited, and
   4. Emergency procedures (such as caesarean sections) are harder to access and may be riskier.

Health indicators summarize survival and disease burdens

1. A common pattern in developing countries is low life expectancy.
2. Contributing factors include:
   1. Poor nutrition
   2. Limited access to healthcare
   3. Poor sanitation, and
   4. Higher prevalence of communicable diseases.
3. A related measure is access to medical care, often approximated by the number of doctors per 1,000 people.
4. Where this number is low, people may lack preventative information (for example about hygiene or vaccination), timely treatment for illness, and safe, supported childbirth.

Education indicators capture skills and opportunities

1. Many developing countries have historically had low literacy rates, although there has been substantial progress in recent decades.
2. Because literacy can be hard to measure consistently, education is often tracked using schooling indicators such as:
   1. Expected years of schooling (how long a child entering school is expected to study) and
   2. Mean years of schooling (the average years actually completed by adults).
3. Education indicators matter because schooling is linked to productivity, health knowledge, and participation in civic life, also connecting strongly to gender equality, since girls' education is often associated with lower infant mortality and lower birth rates.

Income indicators reveal poverty and purchasing power

1. Income is still a key part of development because it affects access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education.
2. An international benchmark often used is the international poverty line.
3. Since October 2015, a person is considered to be living in absolute poverty if they earn less than \$1.90 per day.

How Do Composite Indicators Combine Measures to Reflect Multi-Dimensional Development?

1. Because development includes many dimensions, it's useful to combine indicators to get a broader picture.
2. The most widely used composite indicator is the Human Development Index (HDI), developed for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990 by economists including Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq.
3. The current HDI methodology combines average life expectancy (health), gross national income (GNI) per capita (income), and mean years of schooling plus expected years of schooling (education).
4. HDI is useful because it reduces the risk of overemphasizing income alone. Two countries with similar incomes may differ significantly in education or health outcomes.

How Do Indicators Interact to Create Vicious or Virtuous Cycles?

1. Often, one weak indicator causes or worsens another:
   1. Low income can reduce access to nutritious food and healthcare, lowering life expectancy.
   2. Low education can reduce job opportunities and awareness of health practices.
   3. High birth rates can increase dependency ratios, stretching household and government budgets.
2. Together, these links can create a vicious cycle where lack of development produces outcomes (poor health, limited education, low incomes) that then prevent development from occurring.

How Do Development Indicators Connect to Technology and Infrastructure?

1. Indicators help explain why some countries struggle to gather accurate data and deliver services.
2. In many developing countries, roads and communication systems are rudimentary, and population information may involve extensive paperwork rather than digital systems.
3. Infrastructure affects development directly (for example by improving access to markets and healthcare) and indirectly by improving information flow.
4. The internet can benefit consumers and producers by providing accurate information about the price and availability of goods and services.
5. In many places, mobile phone networks expanded faster than landlines because mobile phone masts are cheaper to install than wired infrastructure.

How Does Development And The Environment Pull in Different Directions?

1. Increased development often involves greater energy use, industrial output, and consumption.
2. This can raise a country's ecological footprint, a measure of how much biologically productive land and water is required to support a population's resource use.
3. A commonly observed pattern is a positive correlation between HDI and ecological footprint: countries with higher HDI often have higher per-person resource consumption.
4. Reasons can include higher incomes increasing consumption, industrialization and transport systems relying on fossil fuels, and changes in diets and housing.

How Do International Development Goals Use Indicators To Track Progress?

1. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by all 193 UN Member States in 2015 with a deadline of 2030.
2. These 17 interconnected goals rely on a broad set of indicators (such as carbon emissions, income inequality, and access to clean energy ) to evaluate progress and hold governments and organizations accountable for a more sustainable future.