293 Miguel Ángel Ballesteros Martín Method for the analysis of geopolitical regions... • Regional economic leadership. • Facilities for the succession of the leaders. 4.3. Application of indicators As Calduch indicates: “The development of behavioral sociology in the United States prompted an irresistible influx in the rest of the social sciences and, naturally, also on the theoreticians of International Relations. The will to impose the methodological rigor that requires the use of mathematics on International Relations prevailed at that moment. Thanks to the use of mathematics, natural sciences were able to emerge from its pre-scientific stage, with the hope of reaching a reasonable degree of prediction”.44 Calduch adds that “another significant aspect of the quantifying tendencies has concentrated on the elaboration of statistical indicators of the main theoretical concepts (….) the elaboration and research of new indicators and statistical series constitutes one of the theoretic-methodological fields that our discipline should pursue”.45 We could initially classify the indexes by the factor in which they are catalogued: physical, human, economic, socio-political, military, etc. And on the other hand, by the number of variables that comprise each one of the indexes, and that may be uni-variant, bi-variant, or multi-variant. As the number of variables that intervene in them grows, its complexity makes them less reliable, especially when one of those variables is not totally objective. Each one of the elements into which we have separated the different factors we have seen previously lead to various indicators of one or two variables. But it is also possible to use multi-variable indicators that are elaborated by different international organizations such as the following: • The Human Development Index (HDI) elaborated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).46 It also elaborates other indexes such as the ones for inequality of human development, gender inequality, gender development, and the multidimensional index of poverty. 44 CALDUCH CERVERA, Rafael. Application of indicators in International Relations: índex of National Political Insecurity. Mexico D.F.: Revista de Relaciones Internacionales nº 94 (January-April 2006), Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, p. 47. 45 Ibídem, pp.48 and 49. 46 UNITED NATIONS PROGRAM FOR DEVELOPMENT. Human Development Report. 2013. Acquired October, 24, 2014, at: http://hdr.undp.org/es/data. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
Revista del IEEE 6
To see the actual publication please follow the link above