CONSTRUCTION OF A MODIFIED QUALITY OF LIFE INDEX --- APPLICATION TO SOUTH ASIAN COUNTRIES

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.

在发展经济学领域，人均国民收入及其近期的福祉指数被视为衡量社会发展与福祉的指标。这些传统的经济发展指标看似不完整、存在争议，有时甚至缺乏全面性，且存在误导之嫌。联合国开发计划署（UNDP）所提出的广为人知的的人类发展指数（HDI）基本上被视为衡量人类生活质量普遍接受的尺度。除此之外，2011年的人类发展报告中还单独构建了调整不平等的人类发展指数（IHDI）和性别不平等指数（GII）。然而，迄今为止，尚无单一指数能够全面捕捉到生活质量的基本维度，包括现有不平等和性别歧视。不仅提供这些成就，而且提供这些设施的经济的社会政治环境在探讨经济生活质量的问题上同样至关重要。人类发展指数（HDI）最重要的缺陷在于它没有将人权视为人类发展的组成部分。因此，在本项研究工作中，重点关注构建一种改进的生活质量指数（QLI）。一种更为全面的改进型QLI，即改进的Borda得分（MBS），将构建出来，以反映调整了不平等和性别不平等的福祉质量，并捕捉到人类发展方法的所有主要组成部分，特别是权利组成部分。此外，我们还将这一新构建的改进指数MBS应用于2013年的南亚国家，并使用次级数据集进行分析。我们还通过比较MBS排名与其他一些重要指数的排名来分析结果。