We construct a new measure of the worldwide variation in human welfare as defined by life-sustenance, esteem, and freedom. A nation's physical, economic, social, and political systems should provide resources, institutions, and cultural environments that foster human welfare. The new Index of Development Status i s an improvement on previous indices because it is built on concepts of human welfare and produces a robust, versatile measure that provides multidimensional insights about world variations.In constructing the new Index, we selected the following variables of systems outputs: physical-total value of primary industry output per capita, persons per square kilometer of arable land; economic-CNPIcapita, and manufacturing value-added per capita; social-infant deaths per 1000 live births, percentage of age group in higher education, and percentage of rural population; politicalgovernment expenditures per capita, political rights index, and number of radios per 1000 population. Factor analysis with varimax rotation yielded four principal factors that correspond conceptually with the physical, economic, social, and political systems. Based on factor scores, we arrayed 160 countries according to the sum of the quintile ranks of their four systems, from most developed to least developed. Various combinations of quintile scores permit us to rank and map countries for overall human welfare, socioeconomic human welfare, sociopolitical human welfare, and politico-economic human welfare. The scale of analysis can be varied to sub-national regions, variables can be added t o each macrosystem to extend the concepts

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Clark University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Economic Geography. This paper illustrates the use of general impact multiplier analysis for studying the apparent causes of Puerto Rico's recent economic difficulties. General impact multiplier analysis treats an economic system holistically and dynamically, and it therefore can be considered a better tool for this purpose than the more familiar econometric model. A simple model of the Puerto Rican economy is used to stimulate multipliers in order to examine the impact of important exogenousvariables on the operations of the island's economy. Conclusions are drawn about which exogenous variables are most significant in explaining Puerto Rico's aggregate consumption, investment, commodity imports, money market imports, exports, and income.Of the several ways to examine the functioning of an economic system, analysis of an econometric model is probably the most useful [4; 5; 7; 8; 12; 13; 18; 28; 30; 31; 32; 33]. The equations in an econometric model specify the behavioral and institutional relationships among variables in the economic system. Consumption, production, investment, import, and export sectors are modeled so that the researcher may gain insights about how the economy works. Such knowledge can aid planners and policy makers who seek to manage an economy to achieve desired results. Interpretation of the structural equations in an econometric model, however, provides only limited information. One limitation is that individual endogenous variables are determined by selected variables, without consideration of the interrelationships among all variables in the system. Furthermore, the parameters of structural equations reveal only the initial impact of selected independent variables on the dependent variable without consideration of the dynamic character of the system. To treat an economic system holistically and to gain insights about its dynamic characteristics, general impact multiplier analysis is an appropriate tool.This study uses general impact multiplier analysis to examine Puerto Rico's recent economic experience. Dutta and Su constructed an econometric model of Puerto Rico and used it to study the economy during the first 16 years of "Operation Bootstrap" [4; 5]. Despite its shortcomings [7], some useful information about an economy at the initial stages of a development program was generated. The economy has recently displayed signs of serious stress [21; 22; 23; 24]. Part of this obviously has been caused by the world economic recession of 1974-1975. More disturbing, perhaps, is the possibility that part of Puerto Rico's economic woes are caused by structural changes associat...

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