An automatic-democratic approach to weight setting for the new human development index

Chris Tofallis ()

Journal of Population Economics, 2013, vol. 26, issue 4, 1325-1345

Abstract: Perhaps the most difficult aspect of constructing a multi-dimensional index is that of choosing weights for the components. This problem is often bypassed by adopting the ‘agnostic’ option of equal weights, as in the human development index. This is an annual ranking of countries produced by the United Nations Development Programme based on life expectancy, education, and per capita gross national income. These three dimensions are now aggregated multiplicatively. Whatever weights (exponents) are chosen for these dimensions, some nations will feel disadvantaged. To avoid the use of arbitrary weights, we propose for consideration a two-step approach: (1) find the most advantageous set of weights for each nation in turn, and (2) regress the associated optimal scores on the underlying indicators to find a single weight set. This approach has the properties of non-subjectivity, fairness, and convenience. The result is that the highest weight is placed on the life expectancy dimension. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013

Keywords: Human development index; Index construction; Social composite index; Aggregation; Ranking; Data envelopment analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00148-012-0432-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:spr:jopoec:v:26:y:2013:i:4:p:1325-1345

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-012-0432-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().