Extent of savings. The extent of a country’s savings may be determined by ascertaining the level of private savings as a fraction of the GNP. Also important is the country’s access to external resources, and that may be gauged by how much official development assistance is provided by the government. Finally, the amount of foreign direct and portfolio investments are also important to capture.
Aggregate growth. In measuring a country’s aggregate growth, the first step is determining the size of the GNP and its annual growth rate. While size of capital resources in a gross sense is an important index of power, it must be refined in two ways. First, it is important to assess how the value of accumulated outputs or capital stacks up in the face of the size of the existing population. The measure of percapita GNP thus becomes important because it describes a country’s level of internal development in notional terms, while simultaneously providing some sense of the balance between internal and external demands on the country’s resources. Per-capita GNP, thus, describes the size of the capital stocks per individual and thereby depicts the relative access to wealth and consumption within a country. It could therefore serve as a corrective measure in some cases insofar as it relates a stock measure of wealth to the number of people
who must be supported by it.