industrial market economies, and nonreporting nonmember economies. More recently, other measures of development have been used with limited degrees of acceptance. The Physical Quality of Life Index measured the level of living on a scale from 0 to 100. The Index of Social Progress included eleven subindexes such as health, education, women, defense, economic, demographic, geographic, political stability, political participation, cultural diversity, and welfare effort components. The Human Suffering Index in the 1980s used ten components, and here the lower the score, the greater the degree of development.
Gonzalez develops an index to ascertain the level of socioeconomic development and explains the components of the index and how they are judged. He uses this index to show that there is a gradual change in the level of development among the countries of the world, allowing for comparisons in levels of development between countries and between regions of the world. The index shows that Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have been losing ground when compared with the advanced industrial world, while the Middle East has improved. Economic transformation is considered separately and shows a reduction overall in the percentage of the population dedicated to agriculture, an increase in the value of manufacturing compared to agriculture, and growth in the industrial population.
Elbow, Gary S., "Coming Out of the Country: Population Growth, Migration, and Urbanization"
Elbow says that change is coming to the Third World as it faces unprecedented population growth and increasing concentration in one or a few giant urban centers in each country. Migration patterns in Third World countries show the shift of millions of people from rural to urban regions, and Elbow says that rapid population growth, migration form rural to urban areas, and accelerated urban growth are responses to similar conditions and are linked as responses...