Approaches in policies and other routes in delivering social progress

I plan to focus my thesis on testing the New Institutional Economic framework by evaluating the link between institutions on wider societal development. I intend on conducting a cross-country analysis of indices of institutional strength, measures of perceived corruption, democracy indices, and property rights to see how these relate to a variety of measures of development. These range from conventional economic indicators such as GDP, to more multidimensional indices such as the Human Development Index, its constituent components, and the Happy Planet Index. This will require methods of regression analysis that will control for between-country differences by using dummy variables to factor for historical and societal factors such as whether the country used to be a formerly colonialised nation.