Prior to 1960, most countries over the world used traditional economic indicators to represent their social status. Economists mostly used Gross National Product, GNP, as a measurement of the social welfare standard of a country or a society. However, with the progress of the development, the traditional economic indicators were unable to follow the progress of social welfares. Therefore, it made economists hard to measure the status of social welfares. Sen (1977) thought that the development of human beings is not restricted to the increase of average disposable incomes only. He thought that people should use the indicators with more information to measure the distinctive diversity of welfares. Bauer (1966) first stated the social indicators as a measurement of social status and trends. Then, the so-called ¡§Social Indicators Movement¡¨ was aroused by Bauer¡¦s theory. As a result, to measure the development of a society entirely, people could determine the development from the medicine, health, economy, environment, and welfare aspects. In the researches about social developments, there were many discussions in building indicators of social welfare, quality of living, basic fulfillment, and development of welfare. The research is trying to establish a system of social indicators to measure the development from every aspect and selecting the social indicator index with representative indicators as a measurement of society development. Moreover, this research would analyze the systems of social indicators in Taiwan from 1982 to 2002 to see if the government made an appropriate allocation of resources in the executions of related policies. The research refers to 20 related indicator systems in Taiwan and overseas as their times of quotes and principles of selecting indicators to sum up 9 probable indicators. Then, the Principal Component Analysis method and the Varian method are adopted as research methods to abstract factors. Moreover, there are two abstracted factors. One is economic and environment factor and another one is medical welfare and unemployment factor. The research uses weighted method to find out the synthetic indicators in Taiwan from 1982 to 2002. The weighted multiple gained from factor analysis for the two factors is 0.8353 and 0.1647. Based on the data mining and analysis from second information, three scores were acquired, economic and environment factor, medical welfare and unemployment factor, and entirely performance. Each of these three scores shows the trend and the change year by year. The last, according the result from this analysis, the policy and recommendation was brought up.

ABSTRACT Most of the countries in the world take increasing national income and improving living standard as their economic development goals. Due to the change of economic structure, the nation¡¦s average national income per year has exceeded USD.10,000, and the people are enjoying the material life brought forth from the high economic growth. However, the increasing of wealth doesn¡¦t guarantee the increasing of happiness and well-being. Therefore, the idea of ¡§Quality of Life¡¨ in the advanced country is to remind us that pursuing living standard is only a tool, pursuing quality of life is the real goal of economic development. Looking back at 50 years¡¦ change of economic structure and the quality of life in Taiwan, the result of the transformation of the economic structure shows on the high multiple increasing of income and the notable improvement of quality of life in each aspect of people¡¦s life, such as education, medical insurance etc. However, pursuing the rapid economic development also brings about the negative effects on the quality of life, causing the impact of environmental pollution and the over development of resource, city densely populated, thus the quality of public security, social order, and nature-ecology environment cannot reach the people¡¦s expectation but even worsen. There is a tendency towards slow rising of the general quality of life index, just as the American economic historian W. W. Rostow said, people begin to improve their quality of life when the economic development comes into the mature stage. As a result, when Taiwan is pursuing the high economic growth and wealth, the improvement of ¡§quality¡¨ is much more important than that of ¡§quantity¡¨. The expense for improving the quality of life today is the investment in the payoff tomorrow. To improve the quality of life, we have to understand the external effect in the change of economic structure, and to estimate and deal with the external cost properly.

This thesis uses the United Nations Human Development Index as a model for comparing a selected set of socioeconomic indicators across Florida’s sixty-seven counties. Whether for urban planning, hazards mitigation, transportation forecasting, or other county-level and state-level functions, information and understanding of socioeconomic conditions are keys to efficient planning and policy making, both in the early development stages as well as during implementation. A summary overview of socioeconomic well-being and its distribution across a given area offers a distinct advantage in terms of deciding where planning or policy changes are most needed and where they will prove most beneficial. This thesis takes a well-established and well documented index used for examining and comparing human development in nations across the globe, and modifies it for comparing county-level socioeconomic conditions across Florida. The results from this modified index are then displayed using choropleth maps as an aid to location interpretation of the ranked socioeconomic values, thereby providing a spatial context for the indexing. In the end, this thesis seeks to answer whether or not the modified index model is a suitable one for normalizing, aggregating, and ranking county-level socioeconomic data for Florida, and whether the use of choropleth mapping to display the rankings is a viable choice.