The drawbacks of using GDP as a measure of advancement or progress of a country has been demonstrated many times before. GDP, being only a measure of the economic advancement of the country does not offer much insight into the other indicator's of a country's well-being such as literacy rate, infant mortality rate and sex ratio.
This exercise looks at metrics that broadly span three categories
- Basic Human Needs
- Foundations of Well-being
- Opportunity
One gets an idea of the granularity and eye to detail with which this exercise was conducted when one looks at the metrics, which cover everything from access to piped water and basic knowledge to outdoor air pollution and tolerance for homosexuals.
What I have done here is not recreate the extremely illustrative and comprehensive graphs done by the Social Progress Imperative; but rather I have attempted to study how natural wealth and democratic index could influence the social progress index and the interaction between the social progress index and GDP per capita.
Democratic Index
The Democratic Index has been developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit and considers the following metrics:
- Electoral process and pluralism
- Functioning of government
- Political participation
- Political culture
- Civil liberties
Based on how countries score on the five categories, they have been grouped into Full Democracies (South Korea, US, UK), Flawed Democracies (Argentina, India) , Hybrid Regimes (Venezuela, Iraq, Lebanon) and Authoritarian Regimes (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates).
Natural Wealth
Information for Natural Wealth per capita has been obtained from the World Bank and in expressed in US dollars. It captures the wealth in terms of crops, pasture land, forests, coal, natural gas, oil and subsoil resources.
Insights
- Few authoritarian regimes dominate the top quadrant of high GDP per capita and high social index. These countries are distinguished by the fact that they are very rich in natural resources.
- The authoritarian regimes are not fully oppressive as one would expect, since in terms of freedom of the press, personal choice, these countries score in the same range of flawed democracies. The real differentiation lies in indicators like political terror and personal safety
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