Index Of Economic Welfare Research Articles

Index of macroeconomic performance for a subset of countries: A Kaldorian analysis from the magic square approach focusing on Brazilian economy in the period 1997-2012

This paper aims to evaluate the macroeconomic performance of some chosen countries in the period 1997-2012 using the four variables that compose the ?magic square? diagram suggested by Nicholas Kaldor (1971). In order to avoid problems with the variables? scale, the standardized ?Index of Economic Welfare? created by Ren? A. Medrano-B and Joan?lio R. Teixeira (2013) was utilized. The results showed a good performance of China and the Asian countries. Furthermore, in spite of the impact of the crises of 1998 and 2008 into Russia, this country presented a good recuperation and achieved a high index just after these crises. The Brazilian performance was somewhat surprising. The country showed a low growth rate and a progressive current account deficit, both typical of developed nations, along with a high inflation, typical of developing countries. A positive aspect seems to be the country?s capability of avoiding external crises, like the verified in 2008-2009.

On Indicators of Economic Welfare

The article deals with the issues of improvement of statistics of population welfare. This category has many aspects and for this reason a system of indicators is normally used for analysis. However, the lack of a single synthetic indicator of the level of living limits the analysis of social processes. In this connection the proposal to compute a new index of economic welfare put forward by two Canadian researches - L. Osberg and A. Sharpe - is discussed in the article.