An Index of Economic and Social Development in a Group of Countries in Africa

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to measure the economic and social development in a group of geographically close countries in Africa. To achieve this goal, we use Pena’s DP2 distance method to compose a synthetic indicator that is constructed taking into account a larger number of variables related to the Goals of the Millennium Declaration provided by the UN, which are generally considered to determine countries’ levels of development. The objective is to produce a global indicator of the fulfilment of these goals that enables the ten African countries to be classified in terms of socioeconomic partial indicators with the data available for these countries, in the framework of the ongoing discussions on the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The most striking differences relate to basic economic and social development variables associated with MDG no 7 on sanitation in a group of countries, while the variable with most relative importance in the synthetic indicator is the linked one of the population using improved drinking water sources.