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Review Of Index Building Methodologies Essay

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Alexander Khoury
11/7/2014
Review of Index Building Methodologies

Introduction:
In recent decades, academics, policymakers and non-governmental organizations have placed greater focus on establishing more comprehensive metrics of well-being and development ##. Measures of national welfare have conventionally centered on a fairly narrow band of economic considerations, such as gross domestic product (GDP) and employment rate. Poverty and wellbeing are now widely understood as multifaceted concepts which cannot be adequately described through measurements of income alone. Economists and development experts are faced with the challenge of constructing metrics to distill the various components of wellbeing into an easily comparable index. The following summarizes the most salient contemporary methods of index construction and provide a brief overview of their strengths and weaknesses.
Transformation Functions: In order to build a multi-dimensional index it is first necessary to convert the various components deemed relevant into a comparable, aggregatable set of units. That is, to find a way to bring variables like average income (which may be expect to fall in the range of tens of thousands of dollars) and life expectancy (which would rarely exceed 90 years) into the same scale of measurement. The mathematical tools used to accomplish this task are known as transformation functions. We can sort the transformation functions which are relevant to index formation into five

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