Accounting for Inequality: A Proposed Revision of the Human Development Index

Elizabeth Stanton

Working Papers from Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Abstract: Human Development Index (HDI) is a country-level measure of social welfare based on national values for average life expectancy, rates of adult literacy and school enrollment, and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Since HDI is based entirely on national averages it can provide only limited information about distribution within countries. The distribution of access to key resources is an important determinant of the effect of health, education and income on both individual well-being and on the aggregate well-being of a population as a whole. This paper makes a case for the importance of inequality to measuring social welfare; presents an original alternative to HDI that includes the distribution of health, education, and income in each country; and reports the results of this inequality-adjusted HDI for 46 countries.

Keywords: Human Development; Inequality; Social Welfare; HDI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H I O (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://per.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers ... rs_101-150/WP119.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to per.umass.edu:443 (No such host is known. )

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:uma:periwp:wp119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judy Fogg ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).