Authors: Daria Mendola Raffaele Scuderi Valerio Lacagnina
Publish Date: 2012/01/19
Volume: 47, Issue: 5, Pages: 2473-2494
Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of harmonic growth as an extended acceptation of the notion of development and discusses its measurement via the Harmonic Growth Index HGI The growth is seen as harmonic when the behaviour of a benchmark time series which here is a measure of wealth such as per capita GDP is followed by a similar pattern in socioeconomic series Unlike most widely used indicators in the literature which take into account the measurement of development over a single time HGI measures the degree to which a social indicator’s time series pattern matches with the GDP’s The index is a function ranging in 0 1 of the coefficients of the uniform Bsplines fitted to each time series according to the functional data framework A case study on Mediterranean welfare countries Greece Italy Portugal and Spain in the period 1996–2007 shows critical differences in the selected indicators which can be ascribed to their dissimilar specific development models HGI can be also considered as a general index to measure the similarity between time patterns or as an alternative to correlation for nonnecessarily linear time series
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