HEALTHY HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDICES

Merwan Engineer (), Nilanjana Roy and Sari Fink

No 1001, Department Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Victoria

Abstract: In the Human Development Index (HDI), life expectancy is the only indicator used in modeling the dimension ‘a long and healthy life’. Whereas life expectancy is a direct measure of quantity of life, it is only an indirect measure of healthy years lived. In this paper we attempt to remedy this omission by introducing into the HDI the morbidity indicator, “expected lost healthy years” (LHE), used in the World Health Report Though LHE is only weakly correlated with life expectancy and displays considerable variation across countries, the ranking of nations using the adjusted HDI is very similar to that from the HDI. Nevertheless, there are some outlier countries (including large countries like China and the United States) that experience notable changes in rank. Given the considerable variation in the morbidity data across gender, we also adjust the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) in a similar fashion. The ranking using the adjusted GDI is very similar to that from the GDI, but it has a lower rank correlation with the HDI.

Keywords: Human Development Index; Healthy Life Expectancy; Morbidity; Gender-related Development Index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I00 I1 O5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2010-01-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-hea
Note: ISSN 1914-2838
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: “Healthy” Human Development Indices (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vic:vicddp:1001

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