Human Development Index

World map showing the Human Development Index (based on 2007 data, published on October 5, 2009)

0.950 and Over      0.900–0.949      0.850–0.899      0.800–0.849      0.750–0.799

0.700–0.749      0.650–0.699      0.600–0.649      0.550–0.599      0.500–0.549

0.450–0.499      0.400–0.449      0.350–0.399      under 0.350      not available

Same map for people with color blindness.

The Human Development Index is a number used to compare different countries published by United Nations Development Programme. It is used to rank countries into different groups like developed, developing and underdeveloped countries.

The Human Development Index uses different measurements of a population, namely

• Life expectancy at birth. This is used to see how healthy people are. It assumes that healthier people live longer, on average.
• Literacy is used to look at how educated people are. This is weighted, two thirds are contributed by the adult literacy rate, that is, how many adults can read and write. One third of this is the gross enrollment ratio, which measures how many of children of schooling age attend school.
• Standard of living. This is measured by taking the gross domestic product and normalizing it taking the total population into account (so that it becomes comparable)

Criticisms

The Human Development Index has been criticized for a number of reasons:

• It does not take into account the ecology, but only looks at the economy.
• It only looks at development at a national level, and leaves out a global view.

Two authors claimed that the human development reports "have lost touch with their original vision and the index fails to capture the essence of the world it seeks to portray". The index has also been criticized as "redundant" and a "reinvention of the wheel", measuring aspects of development that have already been exhaustively studied. The index has further been criticized for having an inappropriate treatment of income, lacking year-to-year comparability, and assessing development differently in different groups of countries.

Some authors have proposed alternative indices to address some of the index's shortcomings.

Economist Bryan Caplan has criticized the way scores in each of the three components are bounded between zero and one, so rich countries effectively cannot improve their ranking in certain categories, even though there is a lot of scope for economic growth and longevity left, "This effectively means that a country of immortals with infinite per-capita GDP would get a score of .666 (lower than South Africa and Tajikistan) if its population were illiterate and never went to school." Scandinavian countries consistently come out top on the list, he argues, "because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is."

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; as a number producing a relative ranking which is useless for inter-temporal comparisons, and difficult to compare a country's progress or regression 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. However, each year, 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.

Other pages

• Constitutional economics
• Political economy