Until recently, development was widely regarded as a largely economic phenomenon. As a result, the main quantitative indicator of.' a country's development status was its gross domestic product. While this index does measure one of the key aspects of development, the accumulation of wealth and productive power, it is clearly inadequate as an indicator of the country's social and institutional characteristics and level of progress. In particular, pure economic measures of development are often quite weakly connected to some of the demographic determinants of fertility and mortality, themselves presumed to be a function as well as determinant of economic growth (Adelman and Morris 1965). Nowhere is the discrepancy between per capita income and the normal patterns of demographic change more obvious than in Saudi Arabia.

Population Bulletin of the UN Economic Commission for West Asia, June 1985.

Refereed Journal Article