Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1.2 MEASURING
DEVELOPMENT
Following Chapter 1.1, given that development is something that does -
or does not - happen over time and across territories, it is inevitable
that scholars and practitioners have sought to find methods to measure
its progress. It also follows from Chapter 1.1 that the approaches used
to measure development have reflected very closely the principal con-
ceptualizations of development as a process that have gained promi-
nance at various times. Thus in the 1950s through to the early 1980s
development was generally measured in terms of economic growth and,
in particular, the growth of production and income. In the late 1980s
through to the 1990s, changes in the way development was being envi-
sioned were directly recognized in the promotion of wider indices of
human development and change.
This trend toward recognizing the multidimensional nature of deve-
lopment was continued from the 1990s through to the start of the
twenty-first century, whereby wider sets of factors, reflecting more sub-
jective and qualitative dimensions of development, have increasingly
been referred to. These have included wider measures of social welfare
and human rights. Accordingly, these three approaches are used in this
chapter to review measures of development, specifically: (i) measuring
development as economic growth: GDP and GNP per capita; (ii) measu-
ring development as human development: the HDI; and (iii) measuring
development in wider terms including human rights and freedoms.
Measuring Development as Economic
Growth: GDP and GNP per capita
In the simplest definition, this approach uses 'income' per head of the
population as a measure of development - suggesting that the higher
the income of a country or territory, the greater its development. The
approach sees development as being essentially the same thing as
