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Essay / The importance of the Human Development Index in...
Human Development IndexIncome is not the only way to calculate a person's well-being. The HDI (Human Development Index) was created to better calculate quality of life. The Human Development Index is divided into 3 parts: GDP per capita, life expectancy, and various measures of education such as school enrollment and literacy rates (“Human Development Index, nd”). Each part ranges from 0 to 1, 0 being the lowest level of development and 1 the highest and a country's score is represented by the percentage value of its score. Average the 3 parts, and you get the HDI. It is therefore quality of life that is measured rather than per capita income; this represents the strong point of the Human Development Index (“Human Development Index, nd”). The first ever Human Development Report was published in 1990. The main creators of the HDI are Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (Briney ,2013). They believed that this index had the potential to change the direction of public decisions from a focus on economic well-being to human well-being ("About Human Development"). The Human Development Index is a statistic superior to GDP in determining people's well-being. the population. The HDI takes into account many characteristics that calculate people's standard of living. GDP per capita is a generalization, because a small group of very wealthy people can make this statistic seem artificially high ("What is the relationship between HDI and GDO? (nd)"). In a situation where HDI is higher than GDP, it reveals how a country's development has taken over in terms of income. This can provide the nation with the development needed for optimal growth, which would enable development to be sustained as growth continues (“About Human Development”). When GDP is greater than HDI, it reveals how production has replaced population development. Due to reduced investments in education and health, access to these services may be more restricted. Simply because money is reinvested in the economy for economic growth instead of being used to increase the overall well-being of the population (What is the connection between HDI and GDO? (nd)) . The Human Development Index was traditionally measured using a set of minimum and maximum values set for life expectancy, knowledge and education, measured by the adult literacy rate with the combination of gross enrollment rate in primary, secondary and higher education and the standard of living (Noorbakhsh, 1998).