The relation known as the Morse inequalities can be extended to a more general setting of flows on a locally compact metric spaces (Conley index) as well as dynamical systems on Hilbert spaces (LS-index). This paper is a discourse around this extension. Except the part concerning the LS-index the material is self-contained and has a character of a survey.

The paper is concerned with the Morse equation for flows in a representation of a compact Lie group. As a consequence of this equation we give a relationship between the equivariant Conley index of an isolated invariant set of the flow given by x˙ = − ∇f(x) and the gradient equivariant degree of ∇f. Some multiplicity results are also presented.