Measuring Sustainable Development: Theory and Application

The paper applies the notion of social well-being to show that “sustainable development” should mean the maintenance of the productive base of an economy relative to its population. It is shown that the concept is operational. Crude data from the world’s poorest countries are used to study whether those countries had experienced sustainable development during the period 1970–2000. The findings are then compared to the experiences of the United Kingdom and the United States.