Human Development Index

Human Development Index (HDI) Value, 2013

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The Human Development Index is calculated as a geometric mean of three indicators: life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling, and gross national index per capita. Note that this index does not take into account the inequalities, that is, how the gross national index is distributed among the individuals. For this reason, an another index exists: the inequality-adjusted HDI; for more details, see http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr14-report-en-1.pdf.

Source: http://hdr.undp.org/en/

The components of the HDI: countries in the very high HDI group:

The units for the GNI per capita are: Purchase Power Parity dollars.

Why the geometric mean?

The HDI is calculated as a geometric mean of three indices, that is, as the cubic root of their product. Why not an arithmetic mean? According to the unhdp's website: "Unlike the old HDI, the HDI introduced in the 2010 HDR is based on the geometric mean and it takes into account differences in achievement across dimensions. Poor performance in any dimension is now directly reflected in the new HDI, which captures how well a country’s performance is across the three dimensions. That is to say, a low achievement in one dimension is not anymore linearly compensated for by high achievement in another dimension. The geometric mean reduces the level of substitutability between dimensions and at the same time ensures that a 1% decline in index of say life expectancy at birth has the same impact on the HDI as a 1% decline in education or income index. Thus, as a basis for comparisons of achievements, this method is also more respectful of the intrinsic differences across the dimensions than a simple average."