This article is about the Human Development Index (HDPI). For other uses of HDI, see
HDI.
The Human Development Index (HDI) is an index used to rank countries by level of "human development", which usually also implies whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country.
Summary
The HDI combines 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 to measure a country's development.
The HDI combines three basic dimensions:
Methodology
HDI trends between 1975 and 2004
In general, to transform a raw variable, say x, into a unit-free index between 0 and 1 (which allows different indices to be added together), the following formula is used:
- x-index =
where 
and 
are the lowest and highest values the variable x can attain, respectively.
The Human Development Index (HDI) then represents the average of the following three general indices:
2008 statistical update
A new index was released on December 18, 2008. This so-called "statistical update" covers the period up to 2006 and was published without an accompanying report on human development. The update is relevant due to newly released estimates of purchasing power parities (PPP), implying substantial adjustments for many countries, resulting in changes in HDI values and, in many cases, HDI ranks.[1]
Countries not included
The following nations are not ranked in the 2008 Human Development Index, for being unable or unwilling to provide the necessary data at the time of publication.
2007/2008 report
The report for 2007/2008 was launched in Brasilia, Brazil, on November 27, 2007. Its focus was on "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world."[2] Most of the data used for the report are derived largely from 2005 or earlier, thus indicating an HDI for 2005. Not all UN member states choose to or are able to provide the necessary statistics.
The report showed a small increase in world HDI in comparison with last year's report. This rise was fueled by a general improvement in the developing world, especially of the least developed countries group. This marked improvement at the bottom was offset with a decrease in HDI of high income countries.
A HDI below 0.5 is considered to represent "low development". All 22 countries in that category are located in Africa. The highest-scoring Sub-Saharan countries, Gabon and South Africa, are ranked 119th and 121st, respectively. Nine countries departed from this category this year and joined the "medium development" group.
A HDI of 0.8 or more is considered to represent "high development". This includes all developed countries, such as those in North America, Western Europe, Oceania, and Eastern Asia, as well as some developing countries in Eastern Europe, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula. Seven countries were promoted to this category this year, leaving the "medium development" group: Albania, Belarus, Brazil, Libya, Macedonia, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
On the following table, green arrows (▲) represent an increase in ranking over the previous study, while red arrows (▼) represent a decrease in ranking. They are followed by the number of spaces they moved. Blue dashes (▬) represent a nation that did not move in the rankings since the previous study.
2009 report
The 2009 report —to be launched in October 2009— will deal with the issue of migration.[3]
Past top countries
The list below displays the top-ranked country from each year of the index. Canada has been ranked the highest eight times, followed by Norway at six times. Japan has been ranked highest three times and Iceland twice.
In each original report
The year represents when the report was published. In parentheses the year for which the index was calculated.
2008 revision
The 2008 Statistical Update calculated HDIs for past years using a consistent methodology and data series. They are not strictly comparable with those in earlier Human Development Reports. The index was calculated using data pertaining to the year shown.
Criticisms
The Human Development Index has been criticized on a number of grounds, including failure to include any ecological considerations, focusing exclusively on national performance and ranking, and not paying much attention to development from a global perspective. 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".[4] The index has also been criticized as "redundant" and a "reinvention of the wheel", measuring aspects of development that have already been exhaustively studied.[5][6] 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.[7]
Some authors have proposed alternative indices to address some of the index's shortcomings.[8]
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."[9] Scandinavian countries consistently come out top on the list, he argues, "because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is."[9]
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.[10][11][12][13] 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.[14]
References
- ^ News - Human Development Reports (UNDP)
- ^ HDR 2007/2008 - Human Development Reports (UNDP)
- ^ HDR 2009 - Human Development Reports (UNDP)
- ^ Ambuj D. Sagara, Adil Najam, "The human development index: a critical review", Ecological Economics, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 249-264, June 1998.
- ^ McGillivray, Mark, "The human development index: yet another redundant composite development indicator?", World Development, Vol. 19, No. 10, pp. 1461-1468, Oct. 1991.
- ^ T.N. Srinivasan "Human Development: A New Paradigm or Reinvention of the Wheel?", American Economic Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 238-243, May 1994.
- ^ Mark McGillivray, Howard White, "Measuring development? The UNDP's human development index", Journal of International Development, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 183-192, Nov, 2006.
- ^ Farhad Noorbakhsh, "The human development index: some technical issues and alternative indices", Journal of International Development, Vol. 10, No. 5, pp. 589 - 605, Dec. 1998.
- ^ a b Against the Human Development Index Comment Posted Posted May 22, 2009, Bryan Caplan - Library of Economics and Liberty
- ^ Rao VVB, 1991. Human development report 1990: review and assessment. World Development, Vol 19 No. 10, pp. 1451–1460.
- ^ McGillivray M. The Human Development Index: Yet Another Redundant Composite Development Indicator? World Development, 1991, vol 18, no. 10:1461-1468.
- ^ Hopkins M. Human development revisited: A new UNDP report. World Development, 1991. vol 19, no. 10, 1461-1468.
- ^ Tapia Granados JA. Algunas ideas críticas sobre el índice de desarrollo humano. Boletín de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana, 1995 Vol 119, No. 1, pp. 74-87.
- ^ Davies, A. and G. Quinlivan (2006), A Panel Data Analysis of the Impact of Trade on Human Development, Journal of Socioeconomics
See also
External links
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