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.     

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).     

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.     

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.     

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.     

A Regional Development Index for Portugal

In a report from 2008 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development came to the conclusion that Portugal is a country still very much marked by regional asymmetries and in need of better regional governance mechanisms and policies. We propose a regional development index for Portugal at the NUTS III level, based on the methodology of the human development index (HDI) from the United Nations Development Programme, which will be helpful to assess the evolution of the asymmetries between regions and evaluate the need for regional policy. Results show us a country that has most of the highest ranked NUTS III regions positioned along the coastline, although some interior NUTS III regions improved their relative positions in the ranking between 2004 and 2009. In addition to the three traditional dimensions of the HDI—income, education, and health—we include two more, given their increasing importance in the literature that criticizes the HDI and suggests the inclusion of new variables—governance and environment. Results show some considerable differences when we add the environment dimension: the interior regions improve their relative positions in the ranking, but in terms of governance they change little. Results also show that there is still the need for regional policy, although the dispersion in the ranking between the best and worst positioned NUTS III regions has decreased in all dimensions except education.     

“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.     

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。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

基于不同尺度下关中—天水经济区人类发展水平评价

人类发展指数是对一个国家或地区人类发展水平所取得成就的整体评估,用于反映一个国家或地区社会进步的程度。本文以关中—天水经济区为研究对象分别从市域和县域的角度分析了关中—天水经济区人类发展的整体水平以及空间格局。研究结果表明：①市域尺度下,关中—天水经济区人类发展指数的平均值为0.7,整体处于全国中下水平。②县域尺度下,关中—天水经济区人类发展水平呈现不均衡态势且区域差异明显。③影响关中-天水经济区人类发展水平的主要是经济因素。     

The Impact of Colonial Heritage on Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

The study explores the hypothesis of a relationshipbetween colonial heritage and development insub-Saharan Africa. Seventeen countries thatexperienced indirect colonial rule and an equal numberwith a history of direct rule in the region areexamined. Development is defined first, in terms ofhuman development [as per UNDPs Human DevelopmentIndex (HDI)], and then, as the ability of a country totranslate economic gains into improved livingconditions (defined as the difference between acountrys real GDP per capita ranking minus its HDIranking). A relationship is found between colonialheritage and human development but not betweencolonial heritage and the ability to translateeconomic gains into improved conditions. It isconcluded that the difference in human conditions ismore a function of inter-country variabilities inindividual and local autonomy than by state actionsspecifically aimed at improving these conditions.     

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...     

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.     

An Unbalance Adjustment Method for Development Indicators

This paper analyzes some aggregation aspects of the procedure for constructing a composite index on a multidimensional socio-economic phenomenon such as development, the main focus being on the unbalance among individual dimensions. First a theoretical framework is set up for the unbalance adjustment of the index. Then an aggregation function is proposed that takes unbalance among development dimensions into account; a separate index is also introduced that measures the unbalance itself. Finally the dataset of the Index of African Governance for the year 2007 is used to test this method and compare it against the weighted arithmetic mean of variables with relation to the measured values of unbalance, yielding significantly different results for ratings and rankings, which in addition show negative correlations with the unbalance adjustment values. The changes ensuing from the adjustment are commented for some countries.     

Does Individual Secularism Promote Life Satisfaction? The Moderating Role of Societal Development

This study was designed to examine the link between values and life satisfaction, examining the role of culture in this process. Secularism was found to predict life satisfaction scores at a small but statistically very significant level in persons from all nations participating in all four waves of the World Values Survey. The direction and strength of this relationship was moderated, however, by the country’s human development index—people in low-HDI countries consistently showed a negative relationship between secularism and happiness across the four waves of the WVS; people in high-HDI countries initially showed a negative relationship between secularism and happiness in Waves 1 and 2, but a positive relationship between secularism and happiness in Waves 3 and 4. These results thus appear to support a “cultural fit” hypothesis consistently for persons in low HDI countries, and a transition towards a “cultural fit” for persons in HDI countries as data was collected across the four waves. By Wave 4, it is clear that citizens who endorse values consistent with their county’s developmental trajectory are more satisfied with their lives. This study demonstrates the amenability of the data collected by the World Values Survey to individual-level analysis of psychological process that is responsive to the shaping influence of variations in their nation’s societal characteristics.     

The Stability of Rankings Derived From Composite Indicators: Analysis of the “IL Sole 24 Ore” Quality of Life Report

The calculation of composite indicators and the derivation of respective rankings is a common method used to benchmark countries or regions. However, although the statistical robustness of these rankings is often criticised, they often still spark off heated political debate. Here, we assess the sensitivity of the province ranking published by the Italian economics newspaper “Il Sole 24 Ore”. For this purpose, various weighting, normalising and aggregation schemes were compared. Furthermore, to assess the accuracy of the underlying model, confidence intervals were calculated for the indicator values. The dynamic properties of the rankings were also analysed by evaluating the short- and long-term forecast properties of the rankings.     

Measurement of social development: an international comparison

PQLI and HDI are the two most popular measures of development, besides per capita income. Over the years, PQLI appears to be not much in use for regional comparisons, especially after the introduction of HDI. While PQLI considers only the physical variables—adult literacy, life expectancy at birth and infant survival rate, HDI has life expectancy at birth, educational attainment and real GDP per capita (PPP$). PQLI and HDI are similar, the main difference between the two being the inclusion of income in HDI and exclusion of the same from PQLI. In a sense, HDI represents both physical and financial attributes of development and PQLI has only the physical aspects of life. The present author took the lines of PQLI to express development in terms of physical variables and considering development as a multidimensional phenomenon, Ray (1989) [Ray, A. K. (1989). On the measurement of certain aspects of social development, Social Indicators Research (Vol. 21, pp. 35–92). The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.] included as many as 13 physical variables to represent social development across 40 countries; no financial variable was included in the construction of composite index, termed as the Social Development Index, SDI. Incidentally, like PQLI, SDI was introduced before HDI. Unlike PQLI and HDI, SDI considers (i) a large number of indicators representing various concern areas and (ii) a set of objective methods for combining the development indicators as a composite index. Ray (1989) has been restated and updated in this article with newer cross-country information. In the present study, SDI has been constructed for over 102 countries, including 21 OECD countries, using 10 development indicators, instead of 13 indicators in the past. Apart from presenting objective methods for combining indicators into SDI, the present study asserts that SDI works better than HDI as a measure of development for an international comparison. The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not of the institution he serves.