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.     

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.     

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.     

A Calibrated Index of Human Development

The weightings of the four component indicators of the UNDP’s Human Development Index HDI appear to be arbitrary and have not been given justification. This paper develops a variant of the HDI, calculated to reflect peoples’ revealed evaluations of education and the productivity of work. The resulting Calibrated human Development Index CDI has a simpler structure, places greater weight on life expectancy and lesser weight on education. It is validated by high correlation with life evaluations from the World Values Survey. The CDI ranks countries much like the HDI. More importantly, its provenance permits it to be used to assess specific policies, regulations, safety standards, life-saving interventions and health-care alternatives. The CDI is a unified tool for policy evaluation and decision support.     

Human Development Index (HDI) Rank-Order Variability

In accordance with the increasing demand for information, indices are created and national and global rankings made to represent and through which to understand and build policy related to complex situations, processes and trajectories. Different indices for a single concept are also created that have advantages or disadvantages over one another or to overcome certain calculation problems. As one such, the Human Development Index (HDI) presently lists countries according to four different criteria, and remains at the heart of democratic and humanitarian recovery efforts. This type of indicator is taken as a function of past performances, with high performances being the extreme values at positively skewed distributions. Thus, the variability of each unit’s repeated measures is regarded as the result of efforts made between the measurement time points (in the HDI case, of a country to promote development). However, it is assumed that the variability of the units is not homogenous. Here, it is shown that in the HDI case, high performance units show relatively low variability, whereas the middle and middle-low performance units show a high variability. Cluster analysis and Friedman test have been used to determine the characteristics of ordered country rankings. The variability of rank-order should also be taken into account besides the location on the list by clustering the countries according to HDI.     

An Assessment of the Measurement Properties of the Human Development Index

One of the more important determinants of the competitiveness of a nation is the quality of its human capital. The Human Development Index (HDI) is the most widely used yardstick of human development. It measures human development for all the countries of the world, through the use of three factors – longevity, knowledge and GDP measured in purchasing power. This paper evaluates HDI's contribution towards measuring the quality of the human capital component of a nation's competitiveness. Two primary issues under study are the HDI's information properties vis-a-vis its components and its measurement properties as an index. The primary conclusion of the study is that the HDI carries useful information about a country's current development, but not about the future level of development. Hence, further refinements in its construction as well as additional theoretical support as a quantitative measure are needed.     

Inequality in Human Development across the Globe

The Human Development Index is the world's most famous indicator of the level of development of societies. A disadvantage of this index is however that only national values are available, whereas within many countries huge subnational variation in development exists. We therefore have developed the Subnational Human Development Index (SHDI), which shows within-country variation in human development across the globe. Covering more than 1,600 regions within 161 countries, the SHDI and its underlying dimension indices provide a 10 times higher resolution picture of human development than previously available. The newly observed within-country variation is particularly strong in low- and middle-developed countries. Education disparities explain most SHDI inequality within low-developed countries, and standard of living differences are most important within the more highly developed ones. Strong convergence forces operating both across and within countries have compensated the inequality enhancing force of population growth. These changes will shape the twenty-first century agenda of scientists and policy-makers concerned with global distributive justice.     

Human Development Index Based on ELECTRE TRI-C Multicriteria Method: An Application in the City of Recife

The Human Development Index (HDI) is an indicator that measures individuals’ welfare through three dimensions: health, education and income. Since its conception, the HDI has been a focus of attention for various segments of society such as politicians, professionals in the media, policy makers, academics and ordinary citizens. The index, however, has received several criticisms over the years, the compensatory effect between the dimensions being the main one. In this context, this paper puts forward an alternative approach for calculating the Municipal Human Development Index, thereby mitigating some criticisms of the index and supporting public decision making. For this purpose, the ELECTRE TRI-C multicriteria method was used, in order to attenuate the compensatory effect, to reduce calculation problems and to allow comparison year by year. An application was conducted in the city of Recife, Pernambuco, in order to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach. As a result, a more adequate classification of the regions in four levels of human development was obtained.     

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.     

“Healthy” Human Development Indices

In the Human Development Index (HDI), life expectancy is the only indicator used in modeling the dimension ‘a long and healthy life’. Whereas life expectancy is a direct measure of quantity of life, it is only an indirect measure of healthy years lived. In this paper we attempt to remedy this omission by introducing into the HDI the morbidity indicator, “expected lost healthy years” (LHE), used in the World Health Report Though LHE is only weakly correlated with life expectancy and displays considerable variation across countries, the ranking of nations using the adjusted HDI is very similar to that from the HDI. Nevertheless, there are some outlier countries (including large countries like China and the United States) that experience notable changes in rank. Given the considerable variation in the morbidity data across gender, we also adjust the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) in a similar fashion. The ranking using the adjusted GDI is very similar to that from the GDI, but it has a lower rank correlation with the HDI.     

Human Development Over Time: An Empirical Comparison of a Dynamic Index and the Standard HDI

Social Indicators Research - This research uses panel data to explore inferences about human development associated with two different formulations of the Human Development Index (HDI). The first...     

Illicit Financial Flows: Another Road Block to Human Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Social Indicators Research - This article analysed the relationship between illicit financial flows (IFFs) and human development, as measured with the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI),...     

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。     

Composite Indices of Development and Poverty: An Application to MDGs

The measurement of development or poverty as multidimensional phenomena is very difficult because there are several theoretical, methodological and empirical problems involved. The literature of composite indicators offers a wide variety of aggregation methods, all with their pros and cons. In this paper, we propose a new, alternative composite index denoted as MPI (Mazziotta-Pareto Index) which, starting from a linear aggregation, introduces penalties for the countries or geographical areas with ‘unbalanced’ values of the indicators. As an example of application of the MPI, we consider a set of indicators in order to measure the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and we present a comparison between HDI (Human Development Index) methodology, HPI (Human Poverty Index) methodology and MPI.     

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.     

Inequality Assessment by Probabilistic Development Indices

Social Indicators Research - This paper analyses the Human Development Index (HDI) time series from 2010 to 2017. An alternative index is studied, which combines the same components of the HDI by...     

The Choice of Principal Variables for Computing some Measures of Human Well-being

In this paper, we investigate the choice ofprincipal variables for computing three humandevelopment indicators, namely, the HumanDevelopment Index (HDI), the Gender-RelatedDevelopment Index (GDI), and the GenderEmpowerment Measure (GEM). To this end, datafrom the 1999 Human Development Reportare used. Empirical results providejustification for selecting only one componentof each indicator. The paper also suggests analternative weighting scheme should all thethree components of each indicator be retained.The implications of these results fordevelopment policy are discussed.     

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.     

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.     

Patterns of Human Development Indicators Across Constitutional Analysis of Children’s Rights to Protection, Provision, and Participation

This study examines children’s images in constitutions and/or amendments as articulated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child while they intersect with the three dimensions of the Human Development Index (HDI) of 2008: life expectancy, educational index, and GDP. The connection between the images of the child and the fulfillment of the dimensions within countries represents the current childhood conditions and determines their future wellbeing. It is the interdependency of the elements of HDI and the premises of the CRC that potentially impact nation-state’s developmental outcome with the process of rights. This study highlights the strength of the connection among the dimensions, and emphasizes the importance of considering children as vital to dialogue around human rights and a human development agenda.