A partner at a private equity firm just asked me for 10 "proprietary nontraditional" key performance indicators for the African economy. Think "tonnage of waste per year", stuff like that. Obviously civil unrest is of real significance. Any good ideas on how to translate that into a usable metric? Other ideas for appropriate "nontraditional" kpi's (can be industry and/or country specific)? I was thinking a commodity-linked indicator would be good too given the many countries' heavy weighting of this in their GDP.
Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. I've got to have them to him by tomorrow afternoon and am struggling. Thanks.
Africa is a continent, not a country. So you cain't really have a good sense of what is going on (e.g. South-Africa economy vs rest of africa's economy)
But I guess in general, the ammount of foreign investment in those countries could be a leading sign;
The corruption & transparency world rank of that country;
When it comes to untraditional key performance indicators, it is a problem because we're talking about Africa here, i.e. no reliable data to work with. The best thing to do is to go there and see for yourself.
However, I'll give it a shot and give some indicators:
You can look at the Happy Planet Index. If people are more happy, sign that things are maybe getting better (2006 vs 2009 ranking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Planet_Index#International_rankings
The # of new born babies = if it is going lower = people are making more money = more productive
The # of cell phones sold = if it is going up = people are trying to make some moves= things are hapening (lol)
The magnetude of the infrastructure spending (# of roads, # of bridges, etc)
Quantity of recycling they do every year
of graduate students in specific programs/sectors (year over year)
Trend of Foreign Aid
I don't know man, lol it's hard.
At least I tried.
Thanks, Abdel. Exactly what I was thinking re: reliability of data. I like the number of graduate students in certain programs and number of cell phones sold. I'm also thinking "miles of paved road per hectare" and "aggregate loan amounts for which countries have been approved" (as a proxy measure for civil unrest and political stability).
Any other thoughts?
Ammount of total exports + value of total exports
Type of input imports: if they're importing more diversified inputs = they're making more complex products
Literacy
Their access to oceans (facilitates exports) + # of airports (+ the type of airport)
Official languages (if it's some native language, chances are, it is not a complex one = does not allow structured thinking/reasoning= don't expect high productivity)
Type of legal system they have
You can find data on road pavement and other related stuff on the CIA world factbook
Thanks again, Abdel. Completely agree with the legal system but how do you put that in a metric? Same for type of input imports?
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