Entradas Etiquetadas con ‘Human Development Index’

Next year it is going to be 20 years since the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) started producing the “Human Development Index”, widely known as the HDI, which ranks countries in the world in categories of very high, high, medium and low human development. When this index started it addressed the need for an alternative measure of “welfare” or “development” to that of per capita income. Measuring per capita income was quite straightforward but sparked extensive debate. During the oil shocks of the 1970’s and 1980’s it was well known that some oil producing and exporting countries had seen their total GDP’s go up at a very fast rate, thus making their per capita incomes very high.  Thus, these countries quickly moved up in the list of the countries with the highest “income levels”.  However, it was known that these countries did not enjoy the same standard of living of other countries with similar, or even lower, per capita incomes. A very high per capita income in a country such as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia may have suggested that the standard of living in these countries was significantly higher than that in several European countries, when analysts knew otherwise. Seguir leyendo…