Human Development Index


The Human Development Index is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores a higher level of HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the gross national income GNI (PPP) per capita is higher. It was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq and was further used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Programme 's Human Development Report Office.
The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an inequality-adjusted Human Development Index. While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development, while the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development that could be achieved if there was no inequality."
The index is based on the human development approach, developed by Mahbub ul-Haq, anchored in Amartya Sen's work on human capabilities, and often framed in terms of whether people are able to "be" and "do" desirable things in life. Examples include — being: well-fed, sheltered, and healthy; doing: work, education, voting, participating in community life. The freedom of choice is considered central — someone choosing to be hungry is considered different from someone who is hungry because they cannot afford to buy food, or because the country is going through a famine.
The index does not take into account several factors, such as the net wealth per capita or the relative quality of goods in a country. This situation tends to lower the ranking of some of the most developed countries, such as the G7 members and others.

Origins

The origins of the HDI are found in the annual Human Development Reports produced by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme. These annual reports were devised and launched by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq in 1990, and had the explicit purpose "to shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people-centered policies". He believed that a simple composite measure of human development was needed to convince the public, academics and politicians that they can, and should, evaluate development not only by economic advances but also improvements in human well-being.

Dimensions and calculation

New method (2010 HDI onwards)

Published on 4 November 2010, the 2010 Human Development Report calculated the HDI combining three dimensions:
In its 2010 Human Development Report, the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI. The following three indices are used:
1. Life Expectancy Index
2. Education Index
3. Income Index
Finally, the HDI is the geometric mean of the previous three normalized indices:
LE: Life expectancy at birth

MYS: Mean years of schooling

EYS: Expected years of schooling

GNIpc: GNI (PPP) per capita|Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita]

Old method (HDI before 2010)

The HDI combined three dimensions last used in its 2009 report:
This methodology was used by the UNDP until their 2011 report.
The formula defining the HDI is promulgated by the United Nations Development Programme. In general, to transform a raw variable, say, into a unit-free index between 0 and 1, the following formula is used:
where and are the lowest and highest values the variable can attain, respectively.
The Human Development Index then represents the uniformly weighted sum with contributed by each of the following factor indices:

2023 Human Development Index (2025 report)

The Human Development Report 2025 by the United Nations Development Programme was released on 6 May 2025; the delayed report calculates HDI values based on data collected two years prior in 2023.
Ranked from 1 to 74 in the year 2023, the following countries are considered to have "very high human development":

Past top countries

The list below displays the top-ranked country from each year of the Human Development Index. Norway has been ranked the highest sixteen times, Canada eight times, Iceland three times, and Switzerland and Japan 2 times each.

In each original HDI

The year represents the time period from which the statistics for the index were derived. In parentheses is the year when the report was published.

Geographical coverage

The HDI has extended its geographical coverage: David Hastings, of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, published a report geographically extending the HDI to 230+ economies, whereas the UNDP HDI for 2009 enumerates 182 economies and coverage for the 2010 HDI dropped to 169 countries.

Country/region specific HDI lists

Criticism

The Human Development Index has been criticized on a number of grounds, including focusing exclusively on national performance and ranking, lack of attention to development from a global perspective, measurement error of the underlying statistics, and on the UNDP's changes in formula which can lead to severe misclassification of "low", "medium", "high" or "very high" human development countries.
There have also been various criticism towards the lack of consideration regarding sustainability, social inequality, unemployment or democracy.
The removal of literacy from HDI has been criticized because educational attainment evaluates only the quantity of education but not the quality or the outcomes of education and can result in perverse incentives.
Economists Hendrik Wolff, Howard Chong and Maximilian Auffhammer discuss the HDI from the perspective of data error in the underlying health, education and income statistics used to construct the HDI. They have identified three sources of data error which are: data updating, formula revisions and thresholds to classify a country's development status. They conclude that 11%, 21% and 34% of all countries can be interpreted as currently misclassified in the development bins due to the three sources of data error, respectively. Wolff, Chong and Auffhammer suggest that the United Nations should discontinue the practice of classifying countries into development bins because the cut-off values seem arbitrary, and the classifications can provide incentives for strategic behavior in reporting official statistics, as well as having the potential to misguide politicians, investors, charity donors and the public who use the HDI at large.
In 2010, the UNDP reacted to the criticism by updating the thresholds to classify nations as low, medium, and high human development countries. In a comment to The Economist in early January 2011, the Human Development Report Office responded to an article published in the magazine on 6 January 2011 which discusses the Wolff et al. paper. The Human Development Report Office states that they undertook a systematic revision of the methods used for the calculation of the HDI, and that the new methodology directly addresses the critique by Wolff et al. in that it generates a system for continuously updating the human-development categories whenever formula or data revisions take place.
In 2013, Salvatore Monni and Alessandro Spaventa emphasized that in the debate of GDP versus HDI, it is often forgotten that these are both external indicators that prioritize different benchmarks upon which the quantification of societal welfare can be predicated. The larger question is whether it is possible to shift the focus of policy from a battle between competing paradigms to a mechanism for eliciting information on well-being directly from the population.