CONSTRUCTION OF A MODIFIED QUALITY OF LIFE INDEX --- APPLICATION TO SOUTH ASIAN COUNTRIES
Description
According to the development economics, per-capita measures of National Income and lately Quality of Life Index were considered as indices of development or wellbeing of a society. These orthodox indices of economic development appear as incomplete, disputed and sometimes non-comprehensive and misleading too. United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP’s) well-known Human Development Index (HDI) is basically a universally accepted measure of the quality of life of human being. Beside this an Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) and a Gender Inequality Index (GII) are constructed separately in HDR 2011. But yet there is no single index which will be able to capture the basic dimensions of quality of life with existing inequality and gender discrimination altogether. Not only providing these attainments but also the socio-political environment of the economy where these facilities are being provided is very much important in the question of quality of life of an economy. The most important drawback of HDI is that it does not consider human rights as the component of human development. Hence in this research work, the focus will be on the construction of a modified Quality of Life Index (QLI).A more comprehensive single modified QLI, viz., Modified Borda Score (MBS), will be constructed representing inequality-adjusted, gender-inequality-adjusted quality of life capturing all the major components of human development approach specially also the rights component. And also we apply this newly constructed modified index MBS to South Asian countries for the year 2013 with secondary data set. We also analyze the results comparing ranking on MBS and that on some other important indexes.