Human Development Index

This is an accepted version of this page The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development.

Examples include — being: well-fed, sheltered, and healthy; doing: work, education, voting, participating in community life.

[6] The index does not take into account several factors, such as the net wealth per capita or the relative quality of goods in a country.

These annual reports were devised and launched by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq in 1990, and had the explicit purpose "to shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people-centered policies".

Published on 4 November 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011), the 2010 Human Development Report calculated the HDI combining three dimensions:[8][9] In its 2010 Human Development Report, the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI.

young men and women aged 13–17) GNIpc: Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita

The formula defining the HDI is promulgated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The Human Development Index (HDI) then represents the uniformly weighted sum with 1⁄3 contributed by each of the following factor indices:

[15][16] The Human Development Index has been criticized on a number of grounds, including focusing exclusively on national performance and ranking, lack of attention to development from a global perspective, measurement error of the underlying statistics, and on the UNDP's changes in formula which can lead to severe misclassification of "low", "medium", "high" or "very high" human development countries.

They conclude that 11%, 21% and 34% of all countries can be interpreted as currently misclassified in the development bins due to the three sources of data error, respectively.

Wolff, Chong and Auffhammer suggest that the United Nations should discontinue the practice of classifying countries into development bins because the cut-off values seem arbitrary, and the classifications can provide incentives for strategic behavior in reporting official statistics, as well as having the potential to misguide politicians, investors, charity donors and the public who use the HDI at large.

[17] In 2010, the UNDP reacted to the criticism by updating the thresholds to classify nations as low, medium, and high human development countries.

The Human Development Report Office states that they undertook a systematic revision of the methods used for the calculation of the HDI, and that the new methodology directly addresses the critique by Wolff et al. in that it generates a system for continuously updating the human-development categories whenever formula or data revisions take place.

In 2013, Salvatore Monni and Alessandro Spaventa emphasized that in the debate of GDP versus HDI, it is often forgotten that these are both external indicators that prioritize different benchmarks upon which the quantification of societal welfare can be predicated.

The larger question is whether it is possible to shift the focus of policy from a battle between competing paradigms to a mechanism for eliciting information on well-being directly from the population.