Income per capita and most widely reported, non- or non-exclusively income based human well-being indicators are highly correlated among countries. Yet many countries exhibit higher achievement in the latter than predicted by the former. The reverse is true for many other countries. This paper commences by extracting the inter-country variation in a composite of various widely-reported, non-income-based well-being indices not accounted for by variations in income pre capita. This extraction is interpreted inter alia as a measure of non-economic well-being. The paper then looks at correlations between this extraction and a number of new or less widely-used well-being measures, in an attempt to find the measure that best captures these achievements. A number of indicators are examined, including mea-sures of poverty, inequality, health status, education status, gender bias, empowerment, governance and subjective well-being. 1.

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Abstract In recent years, sustainable development has represented one of the most important policy goals at the global level. How to design specific policy actions and how to measure performance and results continue to present a challenge. The aim of this paper is to identify a numerical measure of ‘sustainable human development ’ by enlarging human development with more specific environmental aspects. The sustainability condition has been directly analysed on the well-being side. Building a complex Sustainable Human Development Index may be a hard task because of data availability. European countries represent a useful pilot area for testing the methodology. The key factors of effective sustainable human development are emphasized, comparing a Sustainable Human Development Index with existing traditional indicators such as the

This paper provides a review and critical discussion of indicators, which attempt to combine the measurement of sustainability with that of well-being. It starts with some commonly agreed definitions of sustainability, showing how most well-being indicators tell us little if anything at all about this issue. Sustainability is most commonly defined in economics as non-declining utility or well-being over time. Yet, due to its future orientation, most indicators of sustainability such as Genuine Savings (GS) have merely focused on the capacity to provide utility in the future, but have not included the measurement of current well-being. Indicators of well-being such as the Human Development Index (HDI), on the other hand, have typically failed to account for sustainability in their measurement of current well-being. The paper then critically reviews the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) and the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which are the most prominent examples of an indicator, which …/…

This paper argues that the future of the Human Development Index published by the United Nations depends on how successfully this index becomes operational and this is more likely to be possible at the country level for a variety of reasons. With this in mind the paper proposes a method and a model for the systematic reduction of regional disparities in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a problem which is of serious concern to policy makers in Iran at present. A number of indicators of education, health and economic welfare, from the recent Human Development Report of Iran 1999, are employed to compare 26 provinces (regions) of Iran. This paper proposes (i) a method for combining the data into a composite index of development and thereby ranking provinces with respect to their overall development; (ii) it proposes a method for capturing the extent of regional disparities with respect to the selected indicators and (iii) it suggests a way of including the results into a policy model which aims at the systematic reduction of regional disparities in Iran. For this purpose it computes a set of targets for various provinces and suggests a way of adjusting these targets. 1 Human Development and Regional Disparities in Iran: A Policy Model

ana perišić, vanja wagner: development index: analysis of the basic instrument of croatian regional policy financial theory and practice 39 (2) 205-236 (2015)

This paper surveys the various composite well-being indices that have been inter-country assessments over the last 40 or so years, including the well known Human Development Index (HDI). A number of issues are considered, including the choice of components, component weights, scale equivalence, non-linearity, correlations among components and the policy relevance of such measures. A number of these issues are examined in the context of a critical review of the many criticisms of the HDI and the United Nations Development Programme’s responses to these criticisms (some involving changes to the design of the index). A basic premise of the paper is that indices used for international well-being comparisons should be relevant to the policies and individual priorities of countries. Possible directions for the future design and application of composite well being indicators are identified, including adoption of country-specific variables, participatory, country and time variant component weighting schemes and the inclusion of human security measures.

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India has adopted a policy of pragmatic engagement with multilateral economic organizations in recent years. In the context of India’s economic diplomacy at the World Trade Organization (WTO), where it is seen as one of the major voices of dissent from the developing world, a shift in its traditional posturing is clearly evident. This article seeks to interpret the shift both in the context of structural changes within the WTO and the changing goals of India’s economic policy. In view of the stalemate at the Doha round of negotiations, the article argues that multi-lateral organizations like the WTO need to recognize the role of domestic lobbies and trans-national civil society networks in shaping the aspirations of emerging economies like India. Multilateral economic institutions (MEI) play a significant role in shaping contemporary political and economic interactions across the globe. By their very nature, MEIs embody the collective aspirations of sovereign states. They derive their authority and legitimacy from the willingness of states to concede part of their sovereign decision-making power to such multilateral bodies. In the post World War II period, MEIs had a clear mandate to resurrect the global political economy from the ravages of the war and set up a system of rules,

measures and considerations for public policy