State of the Future Index: A Measure of the Global Outlook for the Future

摘要

Over the past seven years, the Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations associations has constructed and experimented with a State of the Future Index (SOFI), a measure of the 10-year outlook for the future. This index uses variables which in the aggregate depict whether the future promises to be better or worse; the variables have been recommended by a world-wide expert panel. The SOFI is intended to show the directions and intensity of change in the global outlook and to identify the factors responsible for changes; it may therefore be useful in policy analysis by demonstrating the effects of proposed policies on a nominal State of the Future Index.