Population structure and the human development index

Carmen Herrero (), Ricardo Martinez () and Antonio Villar
Additional contact information
Carmen Herrero: Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico. Universidad de Alicante.

No 19/01, ThE Papers from Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada.

Abstract: This paper provides an alternative way of measuring human development that takes explicitly into account the differences in the countries’ population structures. The interest of this proposal stems from two complementary elements. First, that there is an enormous diversity in the population structures of those countries analysed in the Human Development Reports, particularly the shares of old people in the population. Second, that demographic characteristics are relevant in the evaluation of development possibilities. We propose to change the way of measuring health, education and material wellbeing, in order to take into account those differences in the population structures. Regarding the health component, we substitute Life Expectancy at Birth by Life Potential (the average life expectancy of the current population); concerning education, we change the average between Mean Years of Schooling and Expected Years of Schooling by the Education Potential (a variable that mimics life potential in this context). As for the material well-being, we propose using the Gross National Income per adult, instead of per capita, while keeping logs in the evaluation. The resulting indicator, called Demographically Adjusted Human Development Index, is the geometric mean of the three new variables suitably normalised. We analyse empirically the effect induced by these changes in the evaluation of human development by comparing this way of measurement with the conventional Human Development Index (HDI) for 168 countries.

Keywords: Human development; health; education; income; life potential; education potential. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2019-02-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hap and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ugr.es/~teoriahe/RePEc/gra/wpaper/thepapers19_01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Population Structure and the Human Development Index (2019)
Working Paper: Population Structure and the Human Development Index (2017)
Working Paper: POPULATION STRUCTURE AND THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gra:wpaper:19/01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ThE Papers from Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada. Campus Universitario de Cartuja. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Angel Solano Garcia. ().