The 2010Human Development Report introduced aninequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for thisinequality), while the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development (or the maximum level of HDI) that could be achieved if there was no inequality."[5]
The index is based on the human development approach, developed by Mahbub ul-Haq, anchored inAmartya 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 (e.g. whenfasting for religious reasons) is considered different from someone who is hungry because they cannot afford to buy food, or because the country is going through afamine.[6]
The index does not take into account several factors, such as thenet wealth per capita or the relativequality of goods in a country. This situation tends to lower the ranking of some of the mostdeveloped countries, such as theG7 members and others.[7]
The origins of the HDI are found in the annual Human Development Reports produced by the Human Development Report Office of theUnited Nations Development Programme (UNDP). These annual reports were devised and launched by Pakistani economistMahbub ul-Haq in 1990, and had the explicit purpose "to shift the focus of development economics fromnational income accounting topeople-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 humanwell-being.
The underlying principle behind the Human Development Index[6]
Eighteen is equivalent to achieving amaster's degree in most countries.
3. Income Index (II)
II is 1 when GNI per capita is $75,000 and 0 when GNI per capita is $100.
Finally, the HDI is thegeometric mean of the previous three normalized indices:
LE:Life expectancy at birth MYS: Mean years of schooling (i.e. years that a person aged 25 or older has spent in formal education) EYS: Expected years of schooling (i.e. total expected years of schooling for children under 18 years of age, incl. young men and women aged 13–17) GNIpc:Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita
The HDI combined three dimensions last used in its 2009 report:
Life expectancy at birth, as an index of population health and longevity to HDI
Knowledge and education, as measured by the adultliteracy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiarygross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).
This methodology was used by the UNDP until their 2011 report.
The formula defining the HDI is promulgated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).[13] In general, to transform a rawvariable, say, into a unit-freeindex between 0 and 1 (which allows different indices to be added together), the followingformula is used:
Average annual HDI growth from 2010 to 2023 (published in 2025)
≥ 1.4%
1.2%…1.4%
1%…1.2%
0.8%…1%
0.6%…0.8%
0.4%…0.6%
0.2%…0.4%
0%…0.2%
−0.5%…0%
−1%…−0.5%
< −1%
No data
The Human Development Report 2025 by theUnited Nations Development Programme was released on 6 May 2025; the report calculates HDI values based on data collected in 2023.
Ranked from 1 to 74 in the year 2023, the following countries are considered to have "very high human development":[14]
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.
The HDI has extended its geographical coverage: David Hastings, of theUnited 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.[16][17]
HDI in relation to consumption-basedCO2 emissions per capita
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.[18]
The removal ofliteracy from HDI has been criticized becauseeducational attainment evaluates only the quantity of education but not the quality or the outcomes of education and can result inperverse incentives.[22]
Economists Hendrik Wolff, Howard Chong andMaximilian 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: (i) data updating, (ii) formula revisions and (iii) 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.[18]
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 toThe Economist in early January 2011, the Human Development Report Office responded[23] to an article published in the magazine on 6 January 2011[24] which discusses the Wolffet 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 Wolffet 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.[25]
^A. Stanton, Elizabeth (February 2007)."The Human Development Index: A History".PERI Working Papers. ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst:14–15.Archived from the original on 28 February 2019. Retrieved28 February 2019.
^ab"What is Human Development".HDR. UNDP. 19 February 2015.Archived from the original on 27 October 2017. Retrieved27 October 2017.... human development approach, developed by the economist Mahbub Ul Haq ...
^The Courier. Commission of the European Communities. 1994.
^Mean years of schooling (of adults) (years) is a calculation of the average number of years of education received by people ages 25 and older in their lifetime based on education attainment levels of the population converted into years of schooling based on theoretical duration of each level of education attended. Source:Barro, R. J.; Lee, J.-W. (2010)."A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010".NBER Working Paper No. 15902. Working Paper Series.doi:10.3386/w15902.Archived from the original on 7 August 2011. Retrieved29 July 2011.
^(ESYI is a calculation of the number of years a child is expected to attend school, or university, including the years spent on repetition. It is the sum of the age-specific enrollment ratios for primary, secondary, post-secondary non-tertiary and tertiary education and is calculated assuming the prevailing patterns of age-specific enrollment rates were to stay the same throughout the child's life. Expected years of schooling is capped at 18 years. (Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2010). Correspondence on education indicators. March. Montreal.)
^Hastings, David A. (2009)."Filling Gaps in the Human Development Index".United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Working Paper WP/09/02.Archived from the original on 30 April 2011. Retrieved1 December 2009.
^Monni, Salvatore; Spaventa, Alessandro (2013). "Beyond Gdp and HDI: Shifting the focus from Paradigms to Politics".Development.56 (2):227–231.doi:10.1057/dev.2013.30.S2CID84722678.
