On the physical quality of life index and evaluating economic welfare between nations

Abstract This paper tests for the statistical relationship between the Physical Quality of Life Index and an index of per capita gross national product for 150 nations and concludes that both provide essentially similar welfare rankings. We utilize principal components methodology to estimate PQLI s for 150 countries and find that, due to intercorrelation between the variables in the PQLI , the first principal component explains about 95% of the generalized variance.