Does Human Development Index Provide Rational Development Rankings? Evidence from Efficiency Rankings in Super Efficiency Model

The human development index (HDI) rankings have provided a referenced measure for people to choose a country in which to travel or live. This paper employs a superefficiency model to evaluate the rationality of the HDI rankings of 19 evaluated OECD countries in 2009. Compared to the HDI rankings, the efficiency rankings measured by the super-efficiency model have the following two advantages: (1) they consider the inputs that are used to generate the indicators for constructing the HDI, and decide the weights of inputs and outputs endogenously; (2) the input slacks measured by the super-efficiency model can evaluate whether the inputs are over-used and provide the improvement path of each country’s input variables. Empirical result shows that approximately 75 % of the evaluated countries had rather different results in the efficiency rankings and the HDI rankings. Additionally, the input slack shows that roughly 70 % of sample countries over-used their capital per labor relative to their existing outputs (or the HDI).     

Neighborhoods in Development: Human Development Index and Self-organizing Maps

The Human Development Index (HDI) has been instrumental in broadening the discussion of economic development beyond money-metric progress, in particular, by ranking a country against other countries in terms of the well being of their citizens. We propose self-organizing maps to explore similarities among countries using the components of the HDI rather than rankings. The similarities approach using the HDI components reveals information which is not available from ranking or bilateral comparisons. By illustrating clusters of countries, which we call “neighborhoods in development”, self-organizing maps draw out the potential for mutual policy learning among countries and shift the focus to discovering what kind of policies might have led countries change their position in the rankings.     

Employing the Components of the Human Development Index to Drive Resources to Educational Policies

A new form of composition of the indicators employed to generate the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is presented here. This form of composition is based on the assumption that random errors affect the measurement of each indicator. This assumption allows for replacing the vector of evaluations according to each indicator by vectors of probabilities of being the best or the worst according to such attribute. The probabilistic composition of such probabilities of preference according to each indicator into probabilities of being the best or the worst according to all of them generates indices that may unveil, on one hand, performances to be followed and, on the other hand, extreme conditions that an additive composition would hide. Differences between the results of application of the diverse forms of composition are examined in the case of the HDI and in the case of the districts version of the HDI employed to compare Brazilian municipalities. It is verified that the smallest correlation between the education enrolment rate and the other indicators in the Brazilian case enlarges such differences.     

Values Reflected in the Human Development Index

The Human Development Index (HDI) implicitly defines ``human development' and ranks countries accordingly. To elucidate the HDI's meaning of ``human development,' the paper examines the sensitivity of the HDI to changes in its components, namely social indicators of education, longevity and standard of living. The HDI is next compared with two alternatives, the Life Quality Index (LQI) and a Time Allocation Index (TAI) developed in this paper from the HDI's components. Also considered is the likely uncertainly in the HDI and what it means for HDI rankings.It is concluded that the HDI's weighting of the gross domestic product is in good agreement with peoples' preferences as revealed in the LQI and the TAI; further, that the HDI places many times greater weight on education than is indicated by peoples' allocation of time in developed countries. Literacy is accorded very high weight in the HDI, but its measure is unreliable. The HDI ranking of highly developed nations is so close and so uncertain that it is meaningless.     

Avoiding Ranking Contradictions in Human Development Index Using Goal Programming

This paper builds on the extensive literature of the rank reversal issue in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. It is a continuation of the study of Sayed et al. (Soc Indic Res 123(1):1–27, 2015) that exhibited this problem in the human development index (HDI) framework. The proposed methodology, the Goal Programming Benefit-of-the-Doubt (GP-BOD), aims to overcome this problem and obtain consistent and stable rankings. For investigating the credibility of the proposed method in solving this issue, it has been applied to the HDI dataset in 2012. The resulted HDI rankings are compared with those evaluated from eleven overlapping sub-groups that are internationally categorized based on geographic regions and income levels. The results show a solution to the ranking contradictions problem. Among other merits, the results prove two additional features of the proposed GP-BOD model. First, the resulted countries’ rankings are distinguishable and absolutely tie-free. This enhances the discriminating power of the proposed rank preservation model. Second, the GP-BOD weights are evaluated on a common base to compare all countries on the same scale. Moreover, a lower bound is endogenously imposed on these weights to avoid the problem of zero weights. Finally, the validity of the proposed GP-BOD technique has been thoroughly examined using sensitivity tests. The results show stability in the rankings when different methods of normalization and weighting are applied.     

A Human Development Index for the Dalit Child in India

There have been many attempts to measure the quality of life of society in general (such as the Human Development Index of UNDP), or of children in particular (Jordan 1993; Corrie 1994). This article constructs a Human Development Index (HDI) for the Dalit Child in India following the methodology used by UNDP (1990) to construct a human development index for the countries of the world. Dalits (also known as Untouchables, Harijans, Scheduled Castes) have and continue to be a marginalised group in India. Section 1 presents the indicators used to construct the HDI for the Dalit child in India. Section 2 presents the rationale for the choice of the indicators chosen. Section 3 presents the methodology used to construct the HDI for the Dalit child in India. Finally, Section 4 presents the relative ranking of 15 states in India based on the level of human development as reflected in the HDI constructed for the Dalit child. It also compares the HDI rankings from perspective of the Dalit Child in India with a recent HDI constructed for 17 states in India using similar indicators as UNDP (1990). The policy usefulness of this human development index for the Dalit child in India is that it could serve as an indicator of the social progress achieved in India as the country attempts to fulfill its constitutional vision of equality for all citizens.     

Exploring Wider Well-Being in the EU-15 Countries: An Empirical Application of the Stiglitz Report

We draw on the recommendations of the Stiglitz Report to select a set of economic and social variables that can be used to make cross-country comparisons of wider well-being. Using data for the EU-15 countries for 1999 and 2005, we show how three-way analysis can be used to extract synthetic information from a large data set to determine the main latent explanatory factors. In our case, we identify one dominant factor that we term the development profile, which is positively associated with the level of education outputs, technological progress and female labour market participation and negatively associated with the level of pollution. We rank the countries according to this factor and compare these rankings with simpler GDP comparisons and find that the two rankings are only weakly correlated.     

Inequality in Human Development: An Empirical Assessment of 32 Countries

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a comparison of the level in human development of the poor with the level of the non-poor within countries, but also across countries. This is an application of the method presented in Grimm et al. (World Development 36(12):2527–2546, 2008) to a sample of 21 low and middle income countries and 11 industrialized countries. In particular the inclusion of the industrialized countries, which were not included in the previous work, implies to deal with a number of additional challenges, which we outline in this paper. Our results show that inequality in human development within countries is high, both in developed and industrialized countries. In fact, the HDI of the lowest quintiles in industrialized countries is often below the HDI of the richest quintile in many middle income countries. We also find, however, a strong overall negative correlation between the level of human development and inequality in human development.     

Rating the Rich: An Ordinal Classification to Determine Which Rich Countries are Helping Poorer Ones the Most

When talking about poverty, a lot of energy is expended by academics and sociologists in the identification and classification of the poor. Less attention is paid to classifying the rich. The Center for Global Development created the Commitment to Development Index in 2003, which ranks countries according to their contribution to the reduction of poverty in developing countries. Since its first report, “Ranking the rich, the Index has been quite successful. However, it has also been subject to multiple criticisms. This paper proposes the use of an ordinal classification to rate, not rank, the performance of rich countries. An ordinal classification, where an ordinal scale labels the examples, can help discovering the level of each country’s commitment to development, automatically and independently from others’ performances. It could stimulate both advocacy from civil society and the determination of more coherent public policies in rich countries for poorer ones.The methodology used is Artificial Neural Networks, a common machine learning tool for successfully solving classification problems. Experiments yield robust results, showing better outcomes than other alternative ordinal classifiers, opening the possibility of developing a classification technique which could overcome the limitations of the current ranking technique.     

基于因子分析法的我国区域人类发展实证研究

本文介绍并引进了以因子分析法为基础构建的人类发展指数(HDI)。通过指标体系的构建、评估方法的选择及与联合国开发计划署制订的人类发展指数比较发现,基于因子分析法的人类发展指数较之传统的方法更适合测算与度量我国区域人类发展水平。     

Are Major Events Capable of Affecting Country Rankings? Validating Composite Indexes of Human Progress and Environmental Performance

A desired characteristic of composite indicators is sensitivity to major adverse events. This paper explores how major civil wars and the 2004 tsunami have influenced Human Development Index (HDI) and Environmental Performance Index (EPI) index values of the affected countries, respectively. The analysis shows that HDI and EPI scores have barely changed, being almost exclusively due to variations in GNI/capita for HDI and air quality for EPI. This casts doubt on the composite indexes’ usefulness and their ability to reflect major environmental and societal changes in the affected countries, or shows which dimensions are truly resilient to these events and can constitute a sustainable base for postwar/post-disaster recovery. Human progress and ecological indicators may need an overhaul, in order to account for the changes that actually happen at a point in time, in order to capture substantial changes in the socio-economic and ecological fabric of a country.     

Measuring World Better Life Frontier: A Composite Indicator for OECD Better Life Index

The OECD Better Life initiative recently released a comprehensive set of 11 indicators of well-being covering a group of countries. Each individual indicator corresponds to a key topic that is essential to well-being. However, the problem of aggregating them is left to users of this dataset. Using these as individual indicators, we propose a composite indicator of overall well-being, which is intended to measure the performance of each country in terms of providing well-being to its people. The ‘benefit of the doubt’ approach (BOD), a well-known aggregation tool based on a weighed sum, assigns the most favourable weights for each entity under investigation. BOD may also be considered to evaluate the performance of each entity in terms of its efficiency. Regarding individual indicators as outputs, it constructs the benchmark production frontier from observed individual indicators. A composite indicator based on BOD equals the distance between each entity’s individual indicator and the production frontier, indicating its efficiency. It is widely considered that the well-being of a country’s people stems from its productive base, which is characterized by capital assets and social infrastructures. Thus, the productive base can be considered the input used to produce well-being, which is reflected by individual indicators. Therefore, when we apply BOD to aggregate individual well-being indicators across countries, we implicitly assume that all countries have the same productive base, as BOD addresses only the output and neglects the input. This inaccurate assumption leads to a distorted performance measure. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), in which BOD has its roots, is a tool to measure the efficiency of each entity by allowing for differences in inputs as well as outputs across entities. DEA also measures efficiency by using the distance to the production frontier; however, unlike BOD, DEA constructs the production frontier more accurately by utilizing the information of inputs as well as outputs, leading to a better performance measure. We apply DEA to aggregate 11 individual well-being indicators into a composite indicator using the World Bank’s estimates of each country’s productive base. The composite indicator based on BOD is distributed similarly to and is highly correlated with the existing Human Development Indicator (HDI). It is also positively correlated with GDP per capita. On the other hand, we show that the composite indicator based on DEA is negatively correlated with HDI as well as GDP per capita.     

Prosperity-Enhancing Institutions: Towards a Comprehensive Composite Index

Institutions that potentially have a positive impact on economic performance rarely exist outside of a system of institutions; rather they are embedded in the institutional order of a country. It is thus imperative to investigate the composition of such prosperity-enhancing institutional orders. This paper proposes a measurement of bundles of institutions that channel the positive effect of democratic institutions on economic prosperity. We construct composite sub-indices measuring the political, economic and societal institutional quality as well as an overall index combining these bundles of institutions. Index data is available for 148 countries between 1995 and 2010. We obtain scores summarizing the level of prosperity-enhancing institutions that the respective countries exhibit with regard to their overall institutional setting and to the three bundles of institutions, and we grade the countries accordingly. Since the indices allow for inter-temporal comparisons, we can highlight a country’s achievements in institutional development, amongst other aspects of country comparisons, and we show their value as a tool in the analysis of determinants of economic prosperity. The proposed indices are a step towards a more systematic international comparison of democratic institutional settings.     

Another Approach to Measuring Human Development: The Composite Dynamic Human Development Index

This paper seeks mainly to contribute to the debate on how the relative degree of development of a country should be measured by proposing an indicator to build on the valuable starting point provided by the Human Development Index (HDI). The indicator proposed is called the “Composite, Dynamic Human Development Index”. It incorporates in a simple way additional points which are significant for the current concept of human development and provides a dynamic factor that distinguishes between countries on the basis of achievements attained. It helps ensure that the static average data on which the HDI is based does not conceal wide-ranging economic, social and political differences within countries, lack of sustainability in current levels of development or effective development strategies drawn up by governments.     

Persistent efforts must continue to be made

Evidence has continuously suggested that population growth in a particular country is closely related to its social stability and economic development. Statistics show that the population growth in the developing countries accounts for 90% of the world's total increase, and the growth rate in those countries is the highest. Therefore, the population problem is of a more serious nature to the developing countries. Unless this problem is solved or at least alleviated, it would be extremely difficult for many developing countries to shed poverty, develop their national economies, and raise standards of living. On the other hand, the trend of growth of the world population and the high rate of population growth in the developing countries will inevitably have grave consequences affecting, directly or indirectly, the economic stability and development of developed countries. These consequences would also affect world peace. The population problem is therefore both a national and an international issue. While each country should take the problem seriously and work hard to tackle it according to its own conditions, all countries in the world should come together to address the problem and make joint efforts for its settlement or alleviation. It is inspiring that the "Day of 5 Billion" has caught global attention and is being observed throughout the world with massive support.     

Keeping things simple: why the Human Development Index should not diverge from its equal weights assumption

Using a range of statistical criteria rooted in Information Theory we show that there is little justification for relaxing the equal weights assumption underlying the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI) even if the true HDI diverges significantly from this assumption. Put differently, the additional model complexity that unequal weights add to the HDI more than counteracts the improvement in goodness-of-fit. This suggests that, in some cases, there may be limited validity in increasing the complexity of a range of other composite sustainability indices.     

The International Multidimensional Fertility Index: The European Case

We propose an index to measure the degree of ability or desire of the population in a given country to have children, via an analysis of certain factors that may have a positive or negative influence on the fertility rate of that country. Using data for the twenty-eight countries of the European Union, and Principal Components Analysis, we construct the International Multidimensional Fertility Index as a combination of four dimensions: (1) Economy and family, (2) Attitudes and habits, (3) Work–Life Balance, and (4) Policy, along with nineteen distinct variables. We find that Denmark, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are among the countries with the highest value of the index, and they also have high fertility rates within the EU. At the other end of the spectrum, Latvia, Cyprus, and Greece, are ranked in the last positions according to our index, countries that also present low values in their fertility rates. We also find a positive correlation between the value of our index and country fertility rates, an indication that our index may be capturing country differences in the conditions for bearing children, with higher values of the index indicating better conditions for childbirth and childrearing. To the extent that international data becomes available, our methodology will allow for the construction of international rankings, helpful in identifying cross-country differences in the conditions for fertility.     

Bringing Affect Back in: Measuring and Comparing Subjective Well-Being Across Countries

In recent years, researchers and policymakers have paid increasing attention to cross-country comparisons of subjective well-being. Whereas classical theories of quality of life emphasize the central role of affective well-being (i.e., whether a person feels good or bad), previous comparative studies have focused almost exclusively on life satisfaction (i.e., cognitive evaluations of life). This study brings affect into the comparative study of subjective well-being, constructing a new measurement instrument that captures both the affective and cognitive dimensions of subjective well-being. Using European Social Survey data and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we estimate latent country means for the two dimensions and compare country rankings across the two measures. The results reveal important differences in country rankings depending on whether one focuses on affective well-being or life satisfaction. We identify crucial differences among top-ranking countries and, perhaps even more importantly, considerable differences in rankings among more moderately ranking countries. In a second step, we compare and evaluate the single-item measures commonly used in previous research with the results based on our new measures. We conclude by discussing our results in relation to previous studies, and in terms of their possible implications for future research and for policymakers bent on improving national levels of subjective well-being.     

Measuring Human Development: A Multi-criteria Approach

In 2010 the Human Development Index (HDI) was revised with several major changes. Many of its problems were tackled, although some drawbacks still persist. This paper proposes a multi-criteria approach to measure human development, propounding two innovations for the computation of the HDI: (1) the introduction of a double reference point scheme in the normalization; (2) an aggregation function which deals with the problem of substitutability between components. In particular, for each component of the HDI the value of each country is normalized by means of two reference values (aspiration and reservation values) by using an achievement scalarizing function that is piecewise linear. Aggregating the new normalized values, we calculate a range of indices with different degrees of substitutability: (1) a weak index that allows total substitutability; (2) a strong index that measures the state of the worst component and allows no substitutability; and (3) a mixed index that is a combination of the first two.     

Measuring Health: A Multivariate Approach

We examined the health status of 171 countries by employing factor analysis on various national health indicators for the period 2000–2005 to construct two new measures on health. The first measure is based on the health of individuals and the second on (the quality of) the health services. Our measures differ substantially from indicators used in previous studies on health and also lead to different rankings of countries. As rankings are not that informative without further information, we analyzed the distance between each country and the sample mean. Differences between countries are much more pronounced for our measure on health services than for our measure on the health of individuals. Using cluster analysis, we classified the countries in six homogenous groups.