Abstract

In this paper, the concept of economic development is tried to be disclosed by proposing measures of economic development or growth. Although traditional measures of economic development such as GDP or GNP are the most prevalent ones in the last decade, new measures are being tried to be found out to well fit the real meaning of economic development; in this respect, Human Development Index is the most leading one. Main purpose of this paper is to see the position of Turkey and to examine the development adventure of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) and KM (South Korea, Malaysia) countries and then to compare Turkey with these countries regarded as the potential development leaders by performing non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS) technique. Moreover, a general evaluation and discussion will be made with respect to the estimation (extrapolation) for the period of 2011 to 2023. According to this, whereas South Korea and Russia are expected to reach higher development levels, Vietnam, Indonesia and Egypt are expected to remain the current levels, not to reach higher development levels.

Key words: Economic development, measuring economic progress, multi-dimensional scaling, trend model, principle component analysis.