Before revision:  From the local scaling exponents calculated for our nine peak regions we have defined what we named the Development Index (H_{DI , which proved, at least in the case of our dataset, to be suitable to rank the SMI series that we have analyzed in three distinct groups . Further verification of this method remains open for future research .
After revision:  From the local scaling exponents calculated for our nine peak regions we have defined what we named the Development Index (H_{DI , which proved, at least in the case of our dataset, to be suitable to rank the SMI series that we have analyzed in three distinct groups .