Balance of payments
The record of a country's transactions with the rest of the world. The current account of the balance of payments consists of: visible trade (goods); 'invisible' trade (services and income); private transfer payments (eg, remittances from those working abroad); official transfers (eg, payments to international organisations, famine relief). The capital account consists of long- and short-term transactions relating to a country's assets and liabilities (eg, loans and borrowings). The current account and the capital account, plus an errors and omissions item, make up the overall balance. Changes in reserves include gold at market prices and are shown without the practice often followed in balance of payments presentations of reversing the sign.
Crude birth rate
The number of live births in a year per 1,000 population.
Crude death rate
The number of deaths in a year per 1,000 population.
Debt, foreign
Financial obligations owed to the rest of the world and repayable in a foreign currency.
Economic freedom index
This ranks countries on the basis of ten indicators of how government intervention can restrict the economic relations between individuals. The economic indicators, published by the Heritage Foundation, are trade policy, taxation, monetary policy, the banking system, foreign-investment rules, property rights, the amount of economic output consumed by the government, regulation policy, the size of the black market and the extent of wage and price controls. A country can score between 1 and 5 in each category, 1 being the most free and 5 being the least free.
Fertility rate
The average number of children born to a woman who completes her childbearing years.
GDP
Gross domestic product. The sum of all output produced by economic activity within a country.
Human Development Index
GDP or GDP per head is often taken as a measure of how developed a country is, but its usefulness is limited as it refers only to economic welfare. In 1990 the UN Development Programme published its first estimate of a Human Development Index, which combined statistics on two other indicators—adult literacy and life expectancy—with income levels to give a better, though still far from perfect, indicator of human development. In 1991 average years of schooling was combined with adult literacy to give a knowledge variable. The HDI is shown here scaled from 0 to 100; countries scoring over 80 are considered to have high human development, those scoring from 50 to 79 medium and those under 50 low.
Life expectancy
The average length of time a baby born today can expect to live.
Literacy.
Defined by UNESCO as the ability to read and write a simple sentence, but definitions can vary from country to country
PPP
Purchasing power parity. PPP statistics adjust for cost of living differences by replacing normal exchange rates with rates designed to equalise the prices of a standard basket of goods and services. These are used to obtain PPP estimates of GDP per head. PPP estimates are shown on an index, taking the United States as 100.
Reserves
The stock of gold and foreign currency held by a country to finance any calls that may be made for the settlement of foreign debt.
