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A Simple Measure of Human Development: The Human Life Indicator

2018; Wiley; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/padr.12205

1728-4457

Simone Ghislandi, Warren C. Sanderson, Sergei Scherbov,

Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy

FOR MUCH OF the twentieth century, statistical measurements of human development emphasized economic magnitudes.In 1990, the United Nations offered an alternative and more comprehensive way of measuring human development, the Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP 1990).The motivation behind the production of the HDI was that economic magnitudes alone provided too narrow a basis for assessing human development.The HDI represents a compromise between comprehensiveness and measurability.In the HDI, the level of human development is conceptualized as having three components: health, education, and economic conditions.These are quantified at the country level using four indicators: life expectancy at birth, mean and expected years of schooling, and the logarithm of Gross National Income per capita (PPP$). 1 The mean and expected years of schooling are combined into a single education index and it is this aggregate that enters the computation of the HDI.These indicators are then rescaled by using "goalposts" (i.e., the rescaled value is calculated as the observed value of each indicator minus the lower goalpost, all divided by the difference between the upper and lower goalposts).The goalposts often change with the HDI version.Although the details of how the HDI is computed have changed from time to time (see Appendix Table A1 for details), the UN has been publishing the "Human Development Reports" regularly since 1990, providing the values of the HDIs for approximately 180 countries around the world and ranking them accordingly (UNDP 1990,