Income, Equality, and Economic Development

Objective This article proposes a simple and operational definition of development that combines the level of income per capita with a measure of income distribution. Method Following the definition, an economic development index is constructed by averaging income per capita with Gini coefficients from the well-known SWIID database. Results A ranking of countries is obtained for the proposed index, and it is compared to the rankings produced using the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI) and the GDP per capita. Conclusion The results for the proposed index show interesting differences with the rankings produced by the HDI and the economists' favorite GDP per capita.