This means thinking beyond agriculture to the rural economy, and beyond saving the small farms on which the poor now reside to generating sustainable employment. The index is constructed from data on a variety of variables related to four main components: political governance, a general indicator of capital available to the broad economy (social indicators and infrastructure), quality of markets generally, and indicators related to the agricultural sector (factor markets, R&D and infrastructure). The author's apply a simple weighting scheme to the various indicators and build an index which is correlated with income per capita and agricultural value-added per worker. The components of the index do vary, although they tend to be positively correlated.