Whether Development Indices Affect Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Analysis

This study aims to examine the relationship between economic growth and highly featured development indices using a cross sectional data of 12 countries from both developed and developing world between the years 2000 and 2013. The indices of corruption, democracy, freedom of press, human development, global competitiveness, economic freedom, and the featured development indicators of World Bank such as average schooling years, life expectancy, female labour force participation rate, health expenditures rate in GDP, export rate of high technology, and employment rate are used to investigate the relationship in between economic growth and development indices. In order to exploit this relationship, all individual indices are reformed to produce form a single index, what we call harmonic index. The findings show that the higher scores of harmonic Index are associated with higher GDP per capita all levels except Saudi Arabia.