The
Human Development Index (
HDI) is an index combining normalized measures of
life expectancy,
literacy,
educational attainment, and
GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is claimed as a standard means of measuring
human development, a concept that, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc. The basic use of HDI is however to rank countries by level of "human development" which usually also implies to determine whether a country is a
developed,
developing, or underdeveloped country.
The index was developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Sir Richard Jolly, with help from Gustav Ranis of Yale University and Lord Meghnad Desai of the London School of Economics. It has been used since then by the United Nations Development Programme in its annual Human Development Report. It is claimed that ideas of Indian Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen were influential in the development of the HDI. Sen described it however as a "vulgar measure", because of its limitations, though accepting that it nonetheless focuses attention on wider aspects of development than the per capita income measure it supplanted. Nowadays the HDI is a pathway for researchers into the wide variety of more detailed measures contained in the Human Development Reports.
The HDI combines three basic dimensions
From the time it was created, the HDI has been criticized as a redundant measure that adds little to the value of the individual measures composing it; as a means to provide legitimacy to arbitrary weightings of a few aspects of social development; and as a number producing a relative ranking which is useless for inter-temporal comparisons, and difficult to interpret because the HDI for a country in a given year depends on the levels of, say, life expectancy or GDP per capita of other countries in that year. [1] [2] [3] [4] Each year, however, UN member states are listed and ranked according to the computed HDI. If high, the rank in the list can be easily used as a means of national aggrandizement; alternatively, if low, it can be used to highlight national insufficiencies. Using the HDI as an absolute index of social welfare, some authors have used panel HDI data to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life.[5]
