SEMINAR: The world in the eyes of a Luenberger development indicator: Who is moving faster in the new century?

This study relies on production theory to construct Luenberger indicators for quality of living across countries. Compared to the famous Human Development Index (HDI), which uses simple weights to average over outcomes, the Luenberger indicator uses a best-practice or frontier approach to the problem thus avoiding the need for ad hoc weighting. Further, the new indicator can be used to incorporate a wider set of outcomes relating to corruption, democratic rights and peace. Both nonparametric (DEA) and stochastic directional distance function frontiers were used to construct the underlying frontier. Our country rankings are compared to rankings based on the HDI. Some countries are graded down heavily relative to the HDI, and these also happen to be nations that are currently suffering from massive upheavals. Finally, the study undertakes a comparison of improvements between 2000 and 2011 using an equivalent productivity change measure to identify nations that are making the most progress.

Atakelty is an Associate Professor in the School of Agricultural and Resource Economics at The University of Western Australia (UWA). He obtained a BSc degree from Alemaya (Haremaya) University (1990) and a PhD from the University of Alberta (1998). Atakelty has won several awards for his academic achievements and has published papers in premier journals. Before joining UWA in 2001, Atakelty had worked at Alemaya and the University of Alberta. His current research interests are diverse and include efficiency and productivity analysis, bioeconomic modelling, environmental policy and auction design, and agent-based modeling (computational economics). Atakelty is also the author of APEAR, a new R package for productivity and efficiency analysis in R.