Fuzzy ranking of human development: A proposal

Buhong Zheng and Charles Zheng

Mathematical Social Sciences, 2015, vol. 78, issue C, 39-47

Abstract: In this paper we propose to measure human development as a fuzzy concept. We stress that there exists a great deal of vagueness in quantifying a country’s level of human development; one such source of vagueness is the weighting scheme embedded in the well-publicized UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI). We propose to evaluate the resulting fuzziness in human development ranking with a truth value function. A truth value is simply a function of the probability that a randomly drawn bundle of weights will rank one country to have a higher HDI than another country. We derive simple and easily computable formulae for calculating the truth value. The method derived is equally applicable to fuzzy rankings with other composite indices.

Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:matsoc:v:78:y:2015:i:c:p:39-47

DOI: 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2015.09.002

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