MACROSOCIAL ACCOUNTING FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.

There is considerable interest in the United States today in social indicators, social accounting and data banks. This interest is in part a simple elaboration of the increasingly heavy use of computers by social scientists, but it also has its roots in the belief, held mainly by sociologists, that social solutions must supersede, or at least temper economic and technical perspectives in the many problem areas of the U.S. This social indicator movement, it does seem to be something of a ground swell among social scientists, is focused on individuals, their attributes and access to goods and services. Given the heavy use made in the United States of sample surveys, it is to be expected that initial efforts to measure the quality of life should take the individual as a unit. However, this approach seems quite inappropriate for developing countries. The outlined contained in this article of a technique for measuring and monitoring over time selected dimensions of the institutional accumulation and patterns of a country is an answer to the question of use of social accounting in developing countries. Even the poorest of countries can profit from knowledge of the institutional characteristics of its principal civil units. Whether to move beyond these units to others such as bureaucracies, factories or ethnic groups is a question that will have to be answered differently for each country, but the indication is that many countries already recognize a need for the minimum information.