Development is a process in which things are changed or made better in an attempt to improve the overall environment.
GDP is an indicator of development used by many people. The advantages of using GDP are that it gives one single clear figure, which is easily presentable. The fact it is a single figure also makes is very easily comparable when measuring countries against each other. Disadvantages of using GDP as a measure of development include, the fact that GDP does not take disparity in incomes between the rich and poor into account, therefore you could have the richest 1% of a population earning 99% of the wealth and GDP would not show this. GDP does not measure the sustainability of growth, for example, a country may achieve a temporarily high GDP by over-exploiting natural resources or by misallocating investment.
HDI is another indicator of development. There is widespread use of HDI to compare development levels and it does reveal clear global patterns. Advantages are things such as, it does not solely concentrate on economic development, and takes into consideration that there are other, more social, ways to measure human development. It shows that an increase in education and health shows can see improvement in a countries infrastructure. The success of government policy can also be seen because if education and health levels are high the policies are likely to be working. Disadvantages could be, data from some developing countries may not be very reliable and may be difficult to confirm. The measures chosen may seem very arbitrary to some because there are other way of measuring relative qualities in health and education. A similar criticism of GDP, that it does not measure unequal distribution within the