What is Human Development Index (HDI)?

National Affairs

What is Human Development Index (HDI)?

29 Jul 2023 Zinkpot 305

Human Development Index (HDI) is one of the greatest instruments for monitoring a nation’s level of progress, as it corporates key social and economic factors that influence economic growth.
It was introduced by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990 and was further used to measure the country’s development by the UNDP.
It shows average performance in three important areas of human development:
- living a long and healthy life,
- having access to education, and
- having an acceptable standard of living.
It works with the notion that the most important factor in determining a nation’s level of development should be its citizens and their capabilities.
While determining the HDI, the geometric mean of three normalized indices is taken into account: Life Expectancy Index (LEI), Education Index (EI), and Income Index (II).
There are three indicators of HDI are:
1. Life expectancy at birth: The life expectancy at birth means how many years a newly born individual is expected to survive in this world. This indicates the element of health in the HDI.
2. Expected years of schooling and mean years of schooling: It comes under the knowledge dimension of the HDI index. The level of education is measured by the expected years of schooling life of a child at the entry age and the mean years of schooling of the adult population.
3. Gross National income: The standard of living of people is measured by the gross national income per capita adjusted for the price level of the country.
UNDP releases the list of the rankings of the countries according to their HDI in order to seek the attention of the policymakers, the media, and the non-governmental organizations of the countries to change the approach from general economic statistics to human outcomes.
It also diagnoses the alternatives of national policy and finds out how two countries with similar level of income per person can have different human development outcomes.
Moreover, it is also used to represent the discrepancy within countries, across genders, between states or provinces, across ethnicities, and other socio-economic groupings.
In the recent HDI index report by UNDP, India ranked 132 among 191 countries with an HDI index of 0.633. This list was topped by Switzerland with the HDI index of 0.962. The country with the least HDI index is Niger at 0.400.