The Measurement Of Development--Theories, Methods, And Analysis

Development is one of the topics people pay the most attention. Because there is disagreement with the meaning of development, researchers give various methods to measure development. Some focus on the growth of GNP or other gross indices, some focus on the psychological satisfaction, still others focus on the development of people's entitlement. All these methods reflect one dimension of development. Among them, the GNP method has the most significant influence. Until the beginning of 1970s, it is nearly the only method to measure development. These methods are based on certain theories of welfare economics or ethic. Because the information the theories focus on is different, the corresponding methods just pay attention to the information their theories focus on and ignore or pay little attention to other information.The tradition theoretic basis of measurement mainly includes utilitarianism, Rawls's entitlement priority, and Nozick's entitlement paramountcy etc. The central focus of utilitarianism is happiness or pleasure. Utilitarian insists that utility is the only index to measure the welfare of an individual or a state. Correspondingly, monetary income is the most suitable index to represent utility. Meanwhile, they maintain three principles: consequentialism, welfarism, and sum-ranking. Based on these three principles, Utilitarian likes to use income or goods to measure utility. To them, the most suitable indices are GNP, GDP or other sum indices. However, these kind of methods neglect equality, pay no attention to entitlement or other factors that do not directly affect utility. In addition, those methods can hardly measure those non-marketable factors. Therefore, less and less researchers choose such methods to measure development. Rawls and Nozick's theories change the trend of ignoring entitlements utilitarianism has. However, they turned to another polar (especially for Nozick). Rawls gave some primary entitlements, believed they have the priority, and maintained that researchers should use his index of primary goods as metric. Nozick believe the paramountcy of entitlement, and extend Rawls's primary entitlements to various entitlements. Rawls and Nozick's theories have a far-reaching effect toevery branch of social science. However, they did not explain why entitlements have the priority. Furthermore, just claiming the priority of entitlements without considering their consequence may hurt people's substantial freedom. Additionally, it is very difficult to use those theories to measure development directly. For instance, the self-respect which is one of Rawls's primary goods is very difficult to be measured. Therefore, though those theories have deep influence to the methods of measuring development, few methods is directly based on the theories.Sen's capability approach contribute the measurement of development much. Sen believe development means the development of people's capability. Therefore, he built his information basis upon people's capability or functionings. Capability approach has strong accommodation and extensive information basis. It uses a multi-dimension view not a one-dimension view to treat development. It is undoubtedly that such view accord with the nature of development better. The recent influential methods, such as Human Development Index (HDI) and Human Poverty Index (HPI), are all based on the approach and use capability or functionings to measure development.Human Development Index (HDI) is the first and the most influential development index based on capability approach. The method of computing its indicators has been modified so that it can be more suitable to measure development. Sen himself once showed his opinion to the modification. (See Anand and Sen, 2000) Since the indicator of GNP per capita is not very representative, I try to modify the indicator to solve the defect.In all, development is a multi-dimension process, so methods measuring development should also have the nature. Because different methods focus on different questions, we should synthesize the results of kinds of methods to make a comprehensive measurement when we evaluate the development of a country.