Human development index

What does this indicator tell us?

The HDI is a summary measure of human development.

How is it defined?

The HDI is a summary composite measure of a country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge and standard of living. It is a measure of a country's average achievements in three dimensions of human development:

• a long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth;
• knowledge, as measured by mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling; and
• a decent standard of living, as measured by GNI per capita in PPP terms in US$.

The HDI sets a minimum and a maximum for each dimension, called "goalposts", then shows where each country stands in relation to these goalposts. This is expressed as a value between 0 and 1. The higher a country's human development, the higher its HDI value.

What are the consequences and implications?

The HDI is used to capture the attention of policy-makers, the media and nongovernmental organizations, and to change the focus from the usual economic statistics to human outcomes. It was created to re-emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth.

The HDI is also used to question national policy choices and to determine how two countries with the same level of income per person can have widely different human development outcomes. For example, two countries may have similar incomes per person, but have drastically differing life expectancy and literacy levels, such that one of the countries has a much higher HDI than the other. These contrasts stimulate debate on government policies concerning health and education to determine why what can be achieved in one country is beyond the reach of the other.

The HDI is also used to highlight differences within countries, between provinces or states, and across genders, ethnicities and other socioeconomic groupings. Highlighting internal disparities along these lines has raised the national debate in many countries.

Source of data

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human development data (http://hdr.undp.org/en/data/). 

Further reading

Klugman J, Rodríguez F, Choi HJ. The HDI 2010: new controversies, old critiques. Human Development Research Paper 2011/01. New York: United Nations Development Programme; 2011 (http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/hdi-2010-new-controversies-old-critiques).

Internet resources

UNDP. Human development index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi/).