Measuring human development index: The old, the new and the elegant

Srijit Mishra () and Hippu Salk Kristle Nathan

Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India

Abstract: The Human Development Index (HDI) is calculated using normalized indicators from three dimensions- health, education, and standard of living (or income). This paper evaluates three aggregation methods of computing HDI using a set of axioms. The old measure of HDI taking a linear average of the three dimensions satisfies monotonicity, anonymity, and normalization (or MAN) axioms. The current geometric mean approach additionally satisfies the axioms of uniformity, which penalizes unbalanced or skewed development across dimensions. We propose an alternative measure, where HDI is the additive inverse of the distance from the ideal. This measure, in addition to the above-mentioned axioms, also satisfies shortfall sensitivity (the emphasis on the neglected dimension should be at least in proportion to the shortfall) and hiatus sensitivity to level (higher overall attainment must simultaneously lead to reduction in gap across dimensions). An acronym of these axioms is MANUSH, which incidentally means human in some of the South Asians languages and the alphabets can also be rearranged to denote HUMANS. Using Minkowski distance function we also give an -class of measures, special cases of which turn out to be the old linear averaging method ( =1) and our proposed displaced ideal measure ( =2) and when 2 then these class of measures also satisfy the MANUSH axioms.

Keywords: Displaced ideal; Euclidean distance; Geometric mean; Hiatus sensitivity to level; Linear averaging; MANUSH; Minkowski distance; Shortfall sensitivity; Uniform development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I31 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2013-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.igidr.ac.in/pdf/publication/WP-2013-020.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ind:igiwpp:2013-020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamprasad M. Pujar ().