Defining and determining national economic success

Economic success is the goal of many different countries across the world. Yet there is no clear-cut consensus regarding how to accomplish or even measure economic success. This thesis looks at two different measurements of economic success, gross domestic product per capita and resource depletion (as an indicator of sustainable development), along with seven possible causes of economic success in order to find out whether or not there are any clear paths to economic success. Using different data sets, we look at how defining economic success two different ways could help clarify whether possible causes of economic success vary in accord with the nature of the economic success at issue. These differences in definition resulted in some of the causes of economic success to be significant in some cases and not in others. Some of the relationships materialized as hypothesized others did not appear as expected or no relationship appeared at all. We suggest that to further research in this area many of the more broad causes could be broken down further in order to see whether specific policies have implications for economic success.