An Economic Development Index

There is no consensus about which variables, apart from income per capita, serve to characterize or define economic development, or guide its teaching. This paper proposes a simple and operational definition that combines the level of income per capita and the distribution of income. An economic development index is then constructed and used to rank a sample of countries from the well-known Deininger and Squire database. The results differ, significantly in some cases, from rankings produced by the United Nations' Human Development Index and the GDP per capita.