Measuring human development: a stochastic dominance approach

Mehmet Pinar, Thanasis Stengos and Nikolas Topaloglou

No 1209, Working Papers from University of Guelph, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: We consider a weighting scheme that yields a best-case scenario for measured human development such as the official equally-weighted Human Development Index (HDI) using an approach that relies on consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE). We compare the official equally-weighted HDI to all possible indices constructed from a set of individual components to obtain the most optimistic scenario for development. In the best-case scenario index education is weighted considerably more than the other two components, per capita income and life expectancy, relative to the weight that it gets in the official equally-weighted index. It turns out that education is also the component with the fastest over time improvement, when compared with per capita income and life expectancy. We find that the best-case scenario hybrid index leads to a marked improvement of measured development over time when compared with the official equally-weighted HDI.

Keywords: Nonparametric Stochastic Dominance; Human Development Index; Mixed Integer Programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C13 C15 O15 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uoguelph.ca/economics/sites/uoguelph.ca.economics/files/2012-09.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.uoguelph.ca/economics/sites/uoguelph.ca.economics/files/2012-09.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.uoguelph.ca/economics/sites/uoguelph.ca.economics/files/2012-09.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring human development: a stochastic dominance approach (2013)
Working Paper: Measuring Human Development: A Stochastic Dominance Approach (2012)
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:gue:guelph:2012-09.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Guelph, Department of Economics and Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stephen Kosempel ().