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Why Are We Worried About Income? Nearly Everything that Matters is Converging
Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and examines if they are converging across countries. It finds that these measures are converging as a rule and (where we have data) that they have been converging for some time. The paper turns to a discussion of what might be driving convergence in quality of life even as incomes diverge, and what this might mean for the donor community....

...Much of the development debate recently has been motivated by the idea that we are failing—developing countries are being left behind and 40 years of state action and foreign aid has done nothing to help that. A broader measure of quality of life should perhaps make us look at the Third World “failures” a little differently. Other quality of life gaps were never as bad for other variables as they were for income—the income measure has always overplayed the difference between India and the United States. Further, and despite the tragedy of AIDS and looming environmental catastrophes, it appears difficult to argue with the statement that quality of life has improved over the past 50 years worldwide and that, for 50 years and sometimes longer, it has improved more rapidly in the developing world than in the developed world. Comparing India to the United Kingdom and United States, for example, convergence began sometime prior to 1950 for literacy and life expectancy and prior to 1913 for primary education. If we are concerned about broader quality of life measures, then, developing countries may have seen their performance excessively maligned (along with inter-war colonies and international donor agencies, perhaps).

The evidence presented above also suggests something about the nature of that success. There has been convergence across a wide range of indicators of the quality of life. Given that there has not been convergence in the standard income indicator, this may suggest that income is only one among a number of factors in determining quality of life outcomes. In turn, this suggests some hope that improvements can be sustained even in the absence of sustained income growth.

The extent of the role that governments have had to play in improving quality of life remains arguable. Literacy appears to be an important factor and government efforts to expand schooling must have played a role here. It seems plausible to argue that even though some government health expenditure is wasted, efforts to (for example) spread vaccines and improve primary care can have a significant payoff.

Whatever the role of government, literacy and vaccine programs surely helped only in combination with technologies that the skill of literacy or the vaccine programs helped to spread. These technologies, which appeared to have done little in increasing Third World income, have at least improved other measures of the quality of life. Given the role that globalization has been argued to play in transferring technology it may be that, along with government, globalization has been too quickly dismissed by some as a driver of development....