Human Development Index

Definition of Human Development Index

The Human Development Index is an amalgamated statistics of education, income indices and life expectancy to rank countries into four tiers of human development.

In HDI 2010 Report, the United Nations Development Programme began using a new method of calculating Human Development Index.

The following 3 indices are used:

• Life Expectancy Index
• Education Index
• Income Index

Finally, Human Development Index is the geometric mean of the above 3 indices

Origin

Human Development Index was created by the economist Mahbub – ul – Haq, followed by Amartya Sen in the year 1990 & published by UNDP.

Inequality – adjusted Human development Index

Human Development Index stands for national average of human development accomplishments in the 3 basic dimensions making up the Human Development Index: education, income and health. Like all averages, it conceals inequalities in human development across the population.

Two countries with dissimilar distributions of accomplishments can have the same average Human Development Index value. Human Development Index takes into account not only average achievements of a country on education, income and health but also how those accomplishments are distributed among the population by “discounting” each aspect’s average value as per its level of inequality.