Time Intervals Versus Composite Index Scores: An Alternative Approach for the Measurement of the Socio-Economic Development of Countries

The construction of composite indicators is one of the methodological standard solutions in order to reduce the complexity of systems of multiple indicators of social development. The method requires non-trivial operations of standardization and weighting of the original indicators and tends to give oversimplified descriptions of the analysed social development. Consequently this article proposes an alternative approach, which translates the original observational data into temporal leads and lags in comparison with a developmental reference trajectory. The result is a system of multiple social times, which are simultaneously present in a national society. Instead of averaging these different social times into a composite index, the article proposes to analyse their minimum- and maximum-values such that the complexity of national development is reduced by the related time-intervals. As a demonstration of the practical usability of the proposed method, the author investigates the socio-economic development of three European countries between 1900 and 2000: Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. It turns out to be possible to transform the original data into temporal leads and lags with regard to the average European development or alternatively its best performance and to compress the resulting data into time-intervals, which have meaningful interpretations on the basis of the respective national histories.