Elias Sanidas
There are at least four levels of socio-economic and political development: institutional environment, micro business governance, economic resource allocation and employment, and finally culture or informal long term institutions. In our study we use methods of multivariate analysis such as multi-dimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering to provide evidence that these four levels (at least) of embeddedness exist as predicted; and that according to this model, countries are clustered together in such a way that we can reasonably accept an overall gauge of socio-economic and political development based on the totality of all variables used in our study, but also based on other individual factors such as government efficiency, or GDP per capita. Our sample consists of 53 countries and 90 socio economic and political variables taken from various well known sources. Results for 1995 and 2011 are examined to check evolution through time. Important conclusions are: first, all socio-economic and political variables considered as totality and as groups grow in tandem; second each group of these four to five levels can separately generate the same classification of countries in terms of socio-economic development; third, some single indicators can be considered as good representatives of this development; and fourth, a 15 year span of development is not sufficient to change the classification of countries between the three main clusters of socio economic and political development.
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