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A total of 236 social, economic, political, and other characteristics were collected for 1955 for all eighty-two then-independent nations of more than 800,000 population. These 236 variables were correlated and factored, and the factors rotated orthogonally. Forty per cent of the total variance in the original matrix is accounted for by three dimensions: size, wealth, and politics. Closely indexing these three dimensions are three variables, themselves practically uncorrelated: population, gross national product per capita, and political orientation-Communist, neutral, or Western. These three variables sort nations into groups of considerable homogeneity. Correlations between these three variables and each of the others show that size, wealth, and politics highly predict a large number of other national characteristics. The prominence of these three dimensions has a number of implications for measurement, design, and analysis of cross-national research.
Jack Sawyer (Fri,) studied this question.