Human Development Index - HDI

'''Human Development Index - HDI '''

definition          A composite of several social indicators that is useful for broad cross-country comparisons even though it yields little specific information about each country. First used in the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report 1990.'' ''



See also  http://hdr.undp.org/en/data/about'' ''

discussion        “Perhaps the most important application of Sen’s capabilities approach is the Human Development Index (HDI), which is published annually by the UNDP. Pioneered by Sen, the American legal ethicist Martha Nussbaum, and the late Mahbub ul Haq of the UNDP, the HDI aims to assess the performance of countries around the world by ranking them in relation to a set of human development indicators. These indicators include ‘conventional’ measurements, such as life expectancy, child and maternal mortality, literacy, income and GDP per capita, as well as ones that affect the capabilities that people living in these countries have in relation to major social groupings, such as gender, ethnicity and class. Included in this latter set of indicators are efforts to quantitatively rank access to things like clean drinking water, primary education, universal healthcare and public and private spending on education, healthcare and infrastructure” (Johnson 2009:113).