Beyond GDP

A recent paper by Stanford economists Chad Jones and Pete Klenow looks at
welfare across countries and across time, here is the abstract.

We propose a simple summary statistic for a nation's flow of welfare,
measured as a consumption equivalent, and compute its level and growth rate
for a broad set of countries. This welfare metric combines data on
consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality. Although it is highly
correlated with per capita GDP, deviations are often economically
significant: Western Europe looks considerably closer to U.S. living
standards, emerging Asia has not caught up as much, and many African and
Latin American countries are farther behind due to lower levels of life
expectancy and higher levels of inequality. In recent decades, rising life
expectancy boosts annual growth in welfare by more than a full percentage
point throughout much of the world. The notable exception is sub-Saharan
Africa, where life expectancy actually declines.

Read the paper: http://www.stanford.edu/~chadj/rawls200.pdf