Human Development Index
thumb|World map representing Human Development Index categories (based on 2019 data, published in 2020).
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thumb|World map of countries by Human Development Index categories in increments of 0.050 (based on 2019 data, published in 2020).
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The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistic composite index of life expectancy, education (literacy rate, gross enrollment ratio at different levels and net attendance ratio), and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores a higher HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the gross national income GNI (PPP) per capita is higher. It was developed by  Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and was further used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Human Development Report Office.

The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for inequality), while the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development (or the maximum level of HDI) that could be achieved if there were no inequality."Human Development Index, "Composite indices — HDI and beyond", Retrieved 16 January 2021.

The index is based on the human development approach, developed by Mahbub ul Haq, often framed in terms of whether people are able to "be" and "do" desirable things in life. Examples include – being: well fed, sheltered, healthy; doing: work, education, voting, participating in community life. The freedom of choice is central – someone choosing to be hungry (as during a religious fast) is quite different from someone who is hungry because they cannot afford to buy food, or because the country is in a famine.

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. This situation tends to lower the ranking for some of the most advanced countries, such as the G7 members and others.

 Origins 

upright=0.8|thumb|Mahbub ul Haq

The origins of the HDI are found in the annual Human Development Reports produced by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). These 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". Haq believed that a simple composite measure of human development was needed to convince the public, academics, and politicians that they can and should evaluate development not only by economic advances but also improvements in human well-being.

thumb|upright=3.5|center|The underlying principles behind the Human Development Index.

 Dimensions and calculation 
 New method (2010 HDI onwards) 

Published on 4 November 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011), the 2010 Human Development Report calculated the HDI combining three dimensions:

 A long and healthy life: Life expectancy at birth
 Education index: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of schooling
 A decent standard of living: GNI per capita (PPP international dollars)
In its 2010 Human Development Report, the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI. The following three indices are used:

1. Life Expectancy Index (LEI) 
LEI is 1 when Life expectancy at birth is 85 and 0 when Life expectancy at birth is 20.
2. Education Index (EI) 
2.1 Mean Years of Schooling Index (MYSI) Mean years of schooling (of adults) (years) is a calculation of the average number of years of education received by people ages 25 and older in their lifetime based on education attainment levels of the population converted into years of schooling based on theoretical duration of each level of education attended. Source: 
 Fifteen is the projected maximum of this indicator for 2025.
2.2 Expected Years of Schooling Index (EYSI) (ESYI is a calculation of the number of years a child is expected to attend school, or university, including the years spent on repetition. It is the sum of the age-specific enrollment ratios for primary, secondary, post-secondary non-tertiary and tertiary education and is calculated assuming the prevailing patterns of age-specific enrollment rates were to stay the same throughout the child's life. Expected years of schooling is capped at 18 years. (Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2010). Correspondence on education indicators. March. Montreal.)
 Eighteen is equivalent to achieving a master's degree in most countries.
3. Income Index (II) 
II is 1 when GNI per capita is $75,000 and 0 when GNI per capita is $100.
Finally, the HDI is the geometric mean of the previous three normalized indices:

LE: Life expectancy at birth
MYS: Mean years of schooling (i.e. years that a person aged 25 or older has spent in formal education)
EYS: Expected years of schooling (i.e. total expected years of schooling for children under 18 years of age)
GNIpc: Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita

 Old method (HDI before 2010) 
The HDI combined three dimensions last used in its 2009 report:

 Life expectancy at birth, as an index of population health and longevity to HDI 
 Knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).
 Standard of living, as indicated by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity.

thumb|right|upright=1.25|HDI trends between 1975 and 2004

This methodology was used by the UNDP until their 2011 report.

The formula defining the HDI is promulgated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In general, to transform a raw variable, say , into a unit-free index between 0 and 1 (which allows different indices to be added together), the following formula is used:

 

where  and  are the lowest and highest values the variable  can attain, respectively.

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

 Life Expectancy Index = 
 Education Index = 
 Adult Literacy Index (ALI) = 
 Gross Enrollment Index (GEI) = 
 GDP = 

 2019 Human Development Index (2020 report) 

The Human Development Report 2020 by the United Nations Development Programme was released on 15 December 2020, and calculates HDI values based on data collected in 2019. Below is the list of countries or territories with very high human development:

  = increase.
  = steady.
  = decrease.

 Rank Country or Territory HDI 2019 data (2020 report) Change over 5 years (2014) 2019 data (2020 report) Average annual HDI growth (2010-2019)       0.957         0.955         0.955         0.949         0.949         0.947         0.945         0.944         0.944         0.940         0.938         0.938         0.932         0.931         0.931         0.929         0.926         0.922         0.919         0.919         0.919          0.917         0.916         0.916         0.904         0.901         0.900         0.895         0.892         0.892         0.890         0.888         0.887         0.882         0.880         0.868          0.866         0.864         0.860         0.854         0.854         0.852         0.851         0.851         0.848         0.845         0.838         0.829          0.828         0.826          0.825         0.824         0.823          0.820         0.817         0.816         0.815         0.814          0.814         0.813          0.812          0.810         0.810         0.806         0.806         0.804   

 Inequality-adjusted HDI (2020 report) 

The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI)Human Development Reports. Composite indices — HDI and beyond. United Nations Development Programme. Retrieved: December 22, 2020. "equals the HDI when there is no inequality across people but is less than the HDI as inequality rises. In this sense, the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for this inequality), while the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development (or the maximum level of HDI) that could be achieved if there was no inequality. The 'loss' in potential human development due to inequality is given by the difference between the HDI and the IHDI and can be expressed as a percentage." Below is the list of countries or territories with very high and high human development:

 Rank Country 2019 estimates (2020 report) IHDI HDI Overall loss (%) Growth since 2010 1    0.899  0.957  6.1   0.021 2    0.894  0.949  5.8   0.055 3   0.889  0.955  6.9   0.015 4    0.888  0.938  5.3   0.040 5   0.885  0.955  7.3  0.066 6    0.883  0.940  6.1   0.025 7    0.882  0.945  6.7   0.033 8   0.878  0.944  7.0  0.036 9   0.875  0.917  4.6    0.047 10   0.869  0.947  8.2   0.016 11    0.867  0.944  8.2   0.011 12    0.860  0.900  4.4   0.042 13    0.859  0.931  7.7   0.026 14    0.859  0.931  7.7  NA 15    0.857  0.922  7.0   0.021 16   0.856  0.932  8.2   0.032 17    0.848  0.929  8.7   0.025 18    0.843  0.919  8.3   0.053 19    0.829  0.882  7.1   0.051 20    0.826  0.916  9.8   0.009 21    0.824  0.949  13.2  NA 22    0.823  0.895  8.0   0.033 23    0.820  0.901  9.0   0.022 24    0.815  0.916  11.0   0.074 25    0.814  0.919  11.4   0.031 26    0.813  0.938  13.3  NA 26   0.813  0.880  7.6   0.063 28   0.808  0.926  12.7   0.004 29    0.807  0.860  6.2   0.032 30    0.805  0.887  9.2   0.048 31  0.791  0.854  7.4  0.032 31    0.791  0.882  10.3   0.055 31    0.791  0.888  10.9   0.014 34    0.783  0.892  12.2   0.010 34    0.783  0.866  9.6   0.050 34    0.783  0.851  8.0   0.092 34    0.783  0.904  13.4   0.004 38    0.771  0.823  6.3   0.050 39    0.766  0.825  7.2   0.105 40    0.761  0.850  12.7   0.031 41    0.749  0.829  9.7   0.026 42    0.740  0.824  10.2   0.049 43    0.730  0.828  11.8   0.022 44   0.729  0.845  13.7   0.063 45   0.728  0.779  6.4  0.035 46   0.721  0.816  11.6   0.022 47    0.716  0.812  11.8   0.093 48   0.712  0.817  12.7  0.055 49  0.709  0.851  16.7  0.058 50   0.708  0.795  10.9  0.058 51    0.706  0.813  13.2  NA 52   0.705  0.806  12.5  0.021

 Past top countries 
The list below displays the top-ranked country from each year of the Human Development Index. Norway has been ranked the highest sixteen times, Canada eight times, and Japan and Iceland twice.

 In each original HDI 
The year represents the time period from which the statistics for the index were derived. In parentheses is the year when the report was published.

 Geographical coverage 
The HDI has extended its geographical coverage: David Hastings, of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, published a report geographically extending the HDI to 230+ economies, whereas the UNDP HDI for 2009 enumerates 182 economies and coverage for the 2010 HDI dropped to 169 countries. Information Note linked to data

 Country/region specific HDI lists 

 African countries
 Argentine provinces
 Australian states
 Bolivian departments
 Brazilian states
 Canadian provinces and territories
 Chilean regions
 Chinese administrative divisions
 Colombian Departaments
 Ethiopian regions
 European countries
 German states
 Indian states
 Tamil Nadu districts
 Indonesian provinces
 Iranian provinces
 Iraqi governorates
 Italian regions
 Japanese prefectures
 Latin American countries
 Mexican states
 New Zealand regions
 Nigerian States
 Pakistani administrative units
 Philippine provinces
 Palestinian regions
 Polish voivodeships
 Russian federal subjects
 South African provinces
 Spanish communities
 Swiss regions
 UK countries and regions of England
 U.S. states (American Human Development Report (AHDR))
 Venezuelan states

 Criticism 
thumb|HDI vs. ecological footprint
The Human Development Index has been criticized on a number of grounds, including alleged lack of consideration of technological development or contributions to the human civilization, 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 in the categorisation of "low", "medium", "high" or "very high" human development countries.

 Sources of data error 
Economists Hendrik Wolff, Howard Chong and Maximilian Auffhammer discuss the HDI from the perspective of data error in the underlying health, education and income statistics used to construct the HDI. They identified three sources of data error which are due to (i) data updating, (ii) formula revisions and (iii) thresholds to classify a country's development status and 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. The authors suggest that the United Nations should discontinue the practice of classifying countries into development bins because: the cut-off values seem arbitrary, can provide incentives for strategic behavior in reporting official statistics, and have the potential to misguide politicians, investors, charity donors and the public who use the HDI at large.

In 2010, the UNDP reacted to the criticism and updated the thresholds to classify nations as low, medium, and high human development countries. In a comment to The Economist in early January 2011, the Human Development Report Office responded to a 6 January 2011 article in the magazine which discusses the Wolff et al. paper. 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.

 See also 

Indices

 Bhutan GNH Index
 Broad measures of economic progress
 Corruption Perceptions Index
 Democracy Index
 Fragile States Index
 Gender Inequality Index
 Gender-related Development Index
 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)
 Global Peace Index (GPI)
 Green gross domestic product (Green GDP)
 Green national product
 Gross domestic product
 Gross National Well-being (GNW)
 Happy Planet Index (HPI)
 Human Poverty Index
 Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI)
 Legatum Prosperity Index
 List of countries by Human Development Index
 Living planet index
 Multidimensional Poverty Index
 OECD Better Life Index (BLI)
 Rule of Law Index
 Social Progress Index
 Where-to-be-born Index
 World Happiness Report

Other

 Developing country
 Economic development
 Ethics of care
 Happiness economics
 Human Development and Capability Association
 Humanistic economics
 International development
 List of countries by percentage of population living in poverty
 List of countries by share of income of the richest one percent
 Right to an adequate standard of living
 Subjective life satisfaction
 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Notes

 References 

 External links 

 Human Development Index
 Human Development Tools and Rankings

 
Category:Development economics
Category:Environmental economics
Category:International rankings
Category:Science and technology in India
Category:Science and technology in Pakistan
Category:American inventions
Category:British inventions
Category:Indian inventions
Category:Pakistani inventions
Category:1990 establishments

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