Human Development Index

12 Key excerpts on "Human Development Index"

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  An Introduction to the Social Geography of India

  Concepts, Problems and Prospects

  • Asif Ali, Hemant(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  The rationale of devising this index is that if people are well educated, healthy and have sufficient income, then they will have the capability to live a life of good quality (Sen, The Standard of Living, 1987). The indicators used by Human Development Index are life expectancy as a measure of health, Mean Years of Schooling completed by adults aged 25 years and more and Expected Years of Schooling upon entering the education system as a measure of education and per capita Gross National Income (GNI) in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms as a measure of income. The HDI is the composite statistical score expressed as a geometric mean of normalised indices for indicators across each of the three dimensions of health, education and income. Its value ranges between 0 and 1, with 0 representing the least and 1 representing the highest level of human development. A country with a high HDI score represents a high average life expectancy, high level of educational attainment and a high income per capita. The HDI is a globally accepted statistic for estimating the real level of development enjoyed by the people of a nation. Even nations or regions that have a small size of economy can also have a high level of human development if the income generated is well distributed and the healthcare and educational facilities are well developed and accessible to the people. HDI scores can be used to assess the welfare services of the government in the sectors of health and education, scrutinise the relative concentration or distribution of wealth, question national policy choices and development outcomes. The Human Development Index is published on an annual basis as a part of the Human Development Report (HDR) by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UNDP borrowed the concept of human development developed by Mahbub-ul-Haq and the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen

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  Science, technology and innovation policies for inclusive growth in Africa : human skills development and country cases

  • (Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • LIT Verlag

    (Publisher)

  The HDRO uses data from international data agencies with the mandate, resources and expertise to collect national data on specific indi- cators. The methodology used to compute human development indices and their components is the same as the one used in the 2015 Report. The Human Develop- ment Report uses the Human Development Index approach for measuring human development. The composite Human Development Index (HDI) integrates three basic dimensions of human development: Life expectancy at birth reflects the abil- ity to lead a long and healthy life. Mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling reflect the ability to acquire knowledge. And gross national income per capita reflects the ability to achieve a decent standard of living. To measure human development more comprehensively, the Human Development Report also pre- sents four other composite indices. The Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) discounts the HDI according to the extent of inequality. The Gender Development Index (GDI) compares female and male HDI values. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) highlights the women’s level of empowerment. And the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures the non-income dimensions of poverty. The Report uses all the composite human development indices— the Human Development Index (HDI), the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), the Gender Development Index (GDI), the Gender Inequality Index (GII), and the Multidi- mensional Poverty Index (MPI). Since the 2010 Human Development Report, four composite human development indices — the HDI, the IHDI, the GII, and the MPI for developing countries — have been calculated. The 2014 Report introduced the GDI, which compares the HDI, calculated separately for women and men; also, it presents a broader set of human development indicators and provides a more com- prehensive picture of a country’s human development.

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  Measurement of Poverty, Undernutrition and Child Mortality (Volume 24.0)

  • Mark Misselhorn(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Essay 4 A Human Development Index by Income Groups Abstract: One of the most often heard critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into ac-count inequality within countries in its three dimensions. We suggest a relatively easy and intuitive approach which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows to compare the level in human develop-ment of the poor with the level of the non-poor within countries, but also across countries. An empirical illustration for a sample of 14 low and middle income countries shows that inequality in human development within countries is indeed high. The results also show that the level of inequality is not directly linked to the level of human development itself. based on joint work with Michael Grimm, Kenneth Harttgen and Stephan Klasen. Mark Misselhorn - 978-3-631-75363-7 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/11/2019 05:54:44AM via free access 84 4. A Human Development Index BY INCOME GROUPS 4.1 Introduction The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite index that measures the av-erage achievement in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate and the combined gross enrollment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary schools; and a decent standard of living, as mea-sured by GDP per capita in purchasing power parity US dollars (UNDP, 2006). Based on available statistics UNDP was able to provide an HDI for 177 coun-tries in the latest Human Development Report (UNDP, 2006). The HDI is today widely used in academia, the media and in policy circles to measure and compare progress in human development between countries and over time. Despite its popularity, which is among other things due to its transparency and simplicity, the HDI is criticized for several reasons.

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  Education and Development

  • Simon McGrath(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Education and human development

  Learning objectives

  By reading this chapter you will be able to:

  • Explain what the human development approach is;
  • Understand its main concepts;
  • Describe how it has been applied to education;
  • Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the approach.

  Introduction

  In Chapter 2 , I noted a number of attempts to move away from a narrowly economistic understanding of the education and development relationship, and from gross national product (GNP) as the core measure of development. I showed that this came onto the global policy stage most dramatically with the emergence of the UNDP’s Human Development Reports (HDRs) and its construction of a Human Development Index (HDI).

  Box 5.1 The Human Development Index

  The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living.

  The health dimension is assessed by life expectancy at birth, the education dimension is measured by mean years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and more and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age. The standard of living dimension is measured by gross national income per capita. The HDI uses the logarithm of income, to reflect the diminishing importance of income with increasing GNI. The scores for the three HDI dimension indices are then aggregated into a composite index.

  It is not intended to be a complete picture of human development but to balance the attraction of a single measure (such as GNP) and the need to see development as being about more than money

  Source: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi

  Mahbub ul Haq, the driving force behind the HDI and the annual Human Development Reports (HDRs), explained that the key purpose of development (and hence of the public good) is to enlarge people’s choices to lead good lives. He argued that we often value achievements that do not show up in income or growth figures, such as access to knowledge; better nutrition and health services; more secure livelihoods; security against crime and physical violence; satisfying leisure hours; political and cultural freedoms; and participation in community activities. The objective of development, ul Haq (1995) proposed, should then be to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives.

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  Human Development and Global Institutions

  Evolution, Impact, Reform

  • Richard Ponzio, Arunabha Ghosh(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As an alternative to GNP and its associated per-capita income measure, the HDI began as a simple aggregate of indicators reflecting three major components of human development: longevity, knowledge, and command over resources needed for a decent living or income. The strengths and weaknesses of the HDI as a measure of human progress in global policy debates are examined, as well as the value of related composite indices such as the Gender-related Development Index (GDI), the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), the Human Poverty Index (HPI), and the Political Freedom Index (PFI). In particular, HDI considers the extent to which human development measurement tools are translated, for example, into revised national budgetary allocations in greater favor of human development policy priorities. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the future of human development composite measures in global governance, including their relationship to the Post-2015 Development Agenda and “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs).

  Evolution of human development measurement tools since 1990

  Since the earliest HDR, the human development school or approach has sought to push the frontiers of measurement. Serving as the report series’ flagship composite indicator, the HDI innovated thinking about human progress. For starters, it critiqued national economic aggregate measures, such as GNP and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as well as per capita income, which together failed to adequately account for the totality of what constitutes development in the twilight years of the twentieth century. In measuring the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development—a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living (elaborated further below)—the HDI, like other measures, also does not take into account the full meaning of development. However, it does represent a radically significant improvement over earlier economic-centric measures.

  2

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  The Process of Economic Development

  Theory, Institutions, Applications and Evidence

  • James M. Cypher, James L. Dietz, James M Cypher, James L Dietz(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 The HDI measure of development is thus broader than the simple income per person yardstick, though income does enter into the calculation of the HDI, something not done in earlier efforts to create an alternative measure of development. At the same time, the HDI also gives direct value to those factors, particularly education, which help create opportunities for individuals to reach a higher and more fulfilling standard of living that may not be captured by the income measure alone. As the UN Development Programme (UNDP) described the issue:

  Human development is about much more than the rise and fall of national incomes. It is about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations.

  (UNDP 2001:9)

  That last sentence is extremely important. It is a nation’s people that comprise the wealth of any society, and meeting the needs and desires of those people is the ultimate purpose of economic growth and development.

  The HDI simplifies the comparison among countries by combining the achievement on the included variables into a single number. The value of the HDI can vary between 0 and 1, with an HDI score closer to 0 indicating greater distance from the maximum to be achieved on the aggregate of the factors entering the HDI. An HDI value closer to 1 indicates greater achievement relative to the highest attainable on the constituent elements of the index and thus a higher level of human development. Thus the HDI is measuring “relative deprivation,” that is, it is measuring how far away a country is from the maximum achievable value of the components that make up the HDI. Roughly, since this is a deprivation index, one can interpret an HDI of 0.600 to indicate that the country has fallen 40 percent short of the maximum level of human development on the indicators in the HDI that could potentially be attained.

  The HDI measure was created with the purpose of attempting to take into account the fact that countries, meaning both governments and individuals, make choices on their spending and use of resources among alternative uses. The use of these resources affects the range of choices open to people and their level of well being with results that may not always be captured in the income per person ranking of nations as to their relative level of development.

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  Indices and Indicators in Development

  An Unhealthy Obsession with Numbers

  • Stephen Morse(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the first HDR of 1990, the UNDP suggested an alternative index for gauging progress in human development (Kelly, 1991; Anand and Sen, 1994; Dowrick, 1996; Moldan, 1997; Ogwang, 2000). The obvious name to use was the Human Development Index (HDI), but what is most interesting is this perceived need to have a headline index to match the new paradigm. Just as economic development had the GDP, so human development had to have the HDI. The rationale also called for an index that would be transparent (hence relatively simple) and intuitive for the target audience (ie politicians, policy makers, managers and the public; Booysen, 2002). As a part of this strategy, it was decided to present the results of the HDI within a country league table format, a sort of ‘naming and shaming’ process, akin to the examples shown in Chapter 1. The league table style is combined with a label of ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ human development applied by the UNDP depending upon each country's value for the HDI. In effect, countries are encouraged to compare their performance with those of others. As broadly the same HDI methodology is used each year it can be argued that between country comparisons are valid (Ogwang, 2000). However, as we will see later, there has been some year-on-year change. A considerable amount obviously depends on the quality of the data collected within each country, with an assumption that this is more or less comparable across countries. The HDI has three components encompassing health, education and income

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  Researching Developing Countries

  A Data Resource Guide for Social Scientists

  • Forrest Daniel Wright(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Chandos Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The UN collects data on human development from a range of sources and produces several annual topical indexes. These indexes cover general human development, gender inequality, gender development, and multidimensional poverty in over 180 countries. The UN develops these indexes by compiling and weighing several human development-related indicators. It should be noted that no one index can fully capture the true state of human development in a particular country. The UN itself admits this and encourages users to use several resources as well as understand the possible shortcomings of development data when researching this topic. The scope and methodology for each index is discussed in greater detail below.

  Scope and Methodology

  Tables 1–3 in the UN database of the UN’s Human Development site all relate to the UN’s “headline” Human Development Index (HDI). At its core, the HDI strives to measure a country’s average achievements in three basic areas of human development: living a long and healthy life, having access to knowledge, and having a decent standard of living. Accordingly, the composite indicators of a country’s HDI reflect these three goals, which are all weighed equally in its calculation. The resulting HDI is based on a 0–1 scale, normalized, where 1 equals a perfect HDI score. These indicators include a country’s life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling, expected years of schooling, and gross national income (GNI) per capita. Both the life expectancy data and GNI were adjusted in the most recent index year, 2013, to reflect new population data collected by the UN population division, as well as new purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion rates published by the World Bank. The data used for the component indicators of the HDI was collected by the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNESA) and UNESCO which compile statistics from national statistical offices and other sources; Barro and Lee’s International Educational Attainment Dataset; and from the World Bank and IMF for GNI data.

  Data Source

  Human Development Index

  Table 1 in the UN database, Human Development Index and Its Components, contains final HDI for 187 countries and additional aggregated regions, as well as data on the HDI’s composite indicators. Users will see that the countries are ranked by their HDI score, and grouped by their development status from “very high” to “low.” The data is presented as a table and can be downloaded as an Excel file. Table 2 in the UN database, Human Development Index Trends, provides each country’s HDI score at various time intervals, from 1980 to the present. Users have more visualization options for this trending index, including being able to view the data as a map, or by a range of charts. Additionally, the data can be downloaded in a range of file formats, including CSV, JSON, XML, RDF, or RSS among others.

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  Economics and History

  Surveys in Cliometrics

  • David Greasley, Les Oxley, David Greasley, Les Oxley(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  What defines the new Human Development Index? In the first place, its social, non-income dimensions are derived using a convex achievement function as an alternative to the linear transformation employed in the UNHDI. Thus, in the new index, as a social indicator reaches higher levels, its increases represent higher achievements than if the same increase would take place at a lower level, whereas in the UNDP linear transformation the same change results regardless of the starting level. Second, in an attempt to reduce substitutability among the index components, its three dimensions (longevity, access to knowledge and average incomes) are combined into the new IHDI using a geometric average, rather than the arithmetic average used in the UNHDI. The final outcome is a new Human Development Index which, by not concealing the gap between rich and poor countries, casts a much less optimistic view than the one provided by conventional UNDP index while satisfying the HDR concern for international differences.

  The chapter is organized in four sections. Section 1 assesses the UNHDI and exposes its main shortcomings. In an attempt to provide a response to these objections Section 2 presents the new IHDI. Then, world trends in human development since the late 19th century, derived from both the IHDI and the UNHDI, are compared in Section 3. Some concluding remarks complete the chapter.

  1. Assessing the Human Development Index

  Challenging GDP (or GNP) per head as a measure of welfare, in spite of its advantage as a synthetic index and the observed association between economic growth and welfare (Lewis, 1955; Beckerman, 1993), has been recurrent since the spread of national accounts more than half a century ago (United Nations, 1954; Dasgupta, 1993; Engerman, 1997; Fleurbaey, 2009). Different socio-economic indicators have been explored as an alternative to GDP per head among which the basic needs approach and the physical index of quality of life are widely known.2 The UNHDI, a synthetic product of the UNDP, published annually since 1990, has been the latest addition to these social welfare measures. Although, on this occasion, the index has reached beyond academic borders, as a measure of well-being the UNHDI has not escaped strong criticism.3

  Human development was originally defined as ‘a process of enlarging people’s choices’ that enables them ‘to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living’ (UNDP, 1990, p. 10). In other words, human development emphasizes positive freedom (Desai, 1991, p. 356). As a synthetic measure of human development, the UNHDI tries to capture a country’s achievements in longevity, knowledge and standard of living through various indices: the relative achievement in life expectancy at birth, in education and in ‘all dimensions of human development not reflected in a long and healthy life and in knowledge’ for which the adjusted per capita

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  Inequality, Poverty and Well-being

  • M. McGillivray(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The use of logs is intended to account for the diminishing returns exhibited by the income component towards the enhancement of human development. Since its inception in 1990, the HDI has spawned a wide gamut of studies that may be classified into three categories. The first deals with attempts to enhance the understanding and justification of the methodological construct. Included here are studies directed towards: (i) detailing the evolution of the construction methodology of the HDI as a measure of human well-being, its impact on policymaking and possible directions for future research (Jahan 2003); (ii) analyzing the characteristics of the HDI as an index, across a variety of dimensions (Ivanova et al. 1999; Alkire 2002); (iii) bridging the gap between the 1990 and the 1994 methods of computing the goalposts (Mazumdar 2003); (iv) extending the diminishing-returns methodology to the computation of the EI (Noorbakhsh 1998); (v) testing with a moderate amount of success the assumption of the HDI construct that per capita GDP exhibits diminishing returns to development (Cahill2002); (vi) studying in more depth the relationship between human development and economic growth (Ranis et al. 2000), as a way of justifying the use of HDI over that of per capita GDP as 'a measure of average achievement in basic human capabilities' Gahan 2003: 3); and (vii) stating reasons why the HDI construct may not have kept up with current global concerns (Sagar and Najam 1998). The second category of studies explores the role of HDI in explaining specific issues related to human development in specific countries. Recent examples of this rather voluminous literature include assessing the extent of regional disparities in Iran (Noorbakhsh 2002) or the state of human development in China (Dejian 2003). The third and final category attempts to extend the HDI's range of applica- bility through the incorporation of other dimensions likely to impact upon a country's human development.

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  Human Development Report 2007/2008

  Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world

  • United Nations Development Programme(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It provides a useful entry point into the rich information contained in the subsequent indicator tables on different as- pects of human development. Data availability determines HDI country coverage The HDI in this Report refers to 2005. It covers 175 UN member countries, along with Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. To enable cross-country comparisons, the HDI is, to the extent possible, calculated based on data from leading international data agencies available at the time the Report was prepared (see Primary international data sources below). But, for a number of countries, data are missing from these agencies for one or more of the four HDI components. For this reason, 17 UN member countries cannot be included in the HDI ranking this year. In- stead a set of basic HDIs for these countries is presented in Table 1a. In very rare cases, HDRO has made special efforts to obtain estimates from other interna- tional, regional or national sources when the primary international data agencies lack data for one or two HDI components of a country. In a very few cases HDRO has produced an es- timate. These estimates from sources other than the primary international agencies are clearly documented in the footnotes to Table 1. They are of varying quality and reliability and are not presented in other indicator tables showing similar data. Primary international data sources Life expectancy at birth. The life expectancy at birth estimates are taken from World Popu- lation Prospects 1950–2050: The 2006 Revi- sion (UN 2007e) the official source of UN population estimates and projections. They are prepared biennially by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (UNPD) using data from national vital registration systems, population censuses and surveys. In The 2006 Revision UNPD incorpo- rated available national data through the end of 2006.

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  Human Development and the Path to Freedom

  1870 to the Present

  • Leandro Prados de la Escosura(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Namely, the equally weighted sum of each component’s inequality – life expectancy (E), years of schooling (S), adjusted income (Y), political and civil liberties, proxied by the index of liberal democracy (L) – plus a residual (R), which accounts for the disparities between AHD dimensions (Martínez, 2016: 417–418). MLD ahd ¼ 1=4MLD E þ 1=4MLD S þ 1=4MLD Y þ 1=4MLD L þ R [3.1] It can be observed that the level of human development inequality depended chiefly on the distribution of education up to World War II, and on that of civil and political liberties thereafter, while longevity contributed to raising inequality up to the mid-1920s (Figure 3.1). 14 But how do international inequality trends in well-being compare to those in GDP per capita for the same country sample? If we first explore the unweighted measure, a long-run increase in per capita income 74 World Distribution of Human Development inequality took place up to 2000 (Table 3.2). The sharp increase in inequality between the end of the Great Depression and 1950 reflects the uneven impact of World War II across countries. A contraction occurred after 2000. In the case of population-weighted inequality, a sustained rise up to the early 1970s took place, punctuated only by a severe contraction during the Great Depression. Inequality has declined since the late twentieth century. Thus, distinctive patterns of international distribution emerge for human development and GDP per capita. 3.3.2 The Role of Large Countries How much do large countries condition the level and trends of population-weighted inequality? For each well-being dimension, I have simulated inequality in the absence of China and India, then Russia, and, finally, sub-Saharan Africa; that is, I have estimated inequality assuming that these regions would have behaved as the average.

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