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,...

This Policy Brief introduces the Gini Trade Index (GTI) as a new trade synthetic key performance indicator capable of capturing the different distribution of trade values across firm characteristics and across countries. The new indicator replicates the well-known features of the traditional...

Seit 1990 veröffentlicht das United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) den sogenannten Human Development Index (HDI), mit dem der Entwicklungsstand eines Landes beschrieben und verglichen werden kann. Zur Beschreibung von Entwicklung stützt sich der HDI auf nur wenige Indikatoren. Dem...

In Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia, Blanchflower and Oswald (2005) observe an apparent puzzle: they claim that Australia ranks highly in the Human Development Index (HDI), but relatively poorly in happiness. However, when we compare their happiness data with...

The study focuses on the quality of live disparities among Hungarian micro-regions as well as among counties. For measuring quality of life HDI was chosen as the index to work with. The analysis focused on three years (1994, 2001 and 2005), which makes it possible to examine the temporal change...

Across the globe there is growing skepticism about the usefulness of GDP as a measure of national well-being. Consequently, several alternative quality-of-life (QOL) measures were developed which either aim at healing the GDP, complementing it, or replacing it. This chapter portrays some of...

The human development index (HDI) developed by the United Nations Development Programme is computed as the average of three equally weighted outcome measures: life expectancy (LI), educational attainment (EI) and income (WI). However, this computational process is independent of the resources...

In diesem Aufsatz wird der ordnungspolitische Hintergrund der menschlichen Entwicklung untersucht. Dabei steht eine empirische Analyse der Faktoren dieser Entwicklung im Vordergrund. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass Ökonometrie ein guter Werkzeug auch für vergleichende Analyse der...

Many successful franchise chains directly own a positive fraction of stores --- a structure referred to as plural form. We propose that this ownership structure is chosen as a commitment not to expropriate franchisees. The theoretical model is based on an empirical analysis of contract and...