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Abstract. The paper applies the notion of social well-being to show that "sustainable development" should mean the maintenance of the productive base of an economy relative to its population. It is shown that the concept is operational. Crude data from the world's poorest countries are used to study whether those countries had experienced sustainable development during the period 1970-2000. The findings are then compared to the experiences of the United Kingdom and the United States.
I. INTRODUCTION
In development economics (in welfare economics, more generally), three questions can be asked in connection with human well-being in an economy: (i) How are people doing? (ii) How have they been doing in recent years? (iii) What should they do? The first question describes the current state of affairs, the second question evaluates recent performance, and the third question seeks to evaluate choices.
No matter which of the three questions we ask, however, we need to have an appropriate measure of human well-being. In recent years, debates on how to measure of human well-being have been influenced by two dichotomies: the constituents versus the determinants of human well-being, and current versus sustainable well-being.1 In publications from international organizations, much emphasis has been placed on the former dichotomy (e.g., UNDP 1994). It is, however, the case that the most well-known indices of social well-being-gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the human development index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-are, for all practical purposes, measures of current well-being. Given the attention "sustainable development" continues to receive in international discourse, an index is needed with which to check whether current policies are consistent with sustainable development.
This paper is structured as follows. Section II defines sustainable development while Section III discusses total factor productivity (TFP). The final section, Section IV, discusses the inclusiveness of investments by comparing the experiences of Pakistan with that of United States (US), People's Republic of China (PRC), and Sub-Saharan Africa. Section V concludes.
II. MEASURING ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
Table 1, which collates well-known statistics about rich and poor countries, is proto-typical of the way the question, "How are people doing?" is addressed. The table offers no comment on the way the second and third questions may be addressed and answered.
The right way...