Human development index

Human development

• Human development is defined as the process of enlarging people's freedom, opportunities and improving well being.

• It values capabilities related to health, education, long life nutrition as ends in its self and it sees income as the means to achieve these.

Features of human development.

• capacity to live a long and fulfilling life.• avoiding mortality during infancy and

childhood.• high literacy level.• personal liberty and freedom.• free from hunger and mal nourishment

Pillars of human development.

• These are desirable structures that need to be in place for human development to prosper.

• Equity- the idea of fairness for every person between men and women i.e. each have a right to health and education.

• Sustainability- the view that we all have the right to a living that can sustain our lives and have access to a more even distribution in goods.

• Productivity- the full participation of people in the process of income generation.

Pillars cont’d

• Empowerment- freedom of the people to influence development and decisions that affect their lives.

• Cooperation- this stipulates participation and belonging to communities as a means of mutual enrichment and a source of social meaning.

• Security - offers people development opportunities freely and safely with confidence that they will not disappear suddenly in future.

Factors affecting human development

• Economic growth.• Demographic factors.• Political climate.• External factors.

Brief description of the HDI.

• The human development index(HDI) measures development by combining indicators of life expectancy, education attainment and income into a composite index.

• The breakthrough for the HDI was the creation of a single statistic which was to serve as a frame of reference for both social and economic development.

• For each dimension, the HDI sets a minimum and maximum called goal posts, and then shows where each country stands in relation to these goalposts, expressed as a value between 0 and 1

Origin of the HDI

• It was created by the Pakistan economist Mahbub ul Haq and the Indian economist Amartya Sen in 1990 and was published by the united nations development program (UNDP).

• It soon became the most widely accepted measure of its kind and has been adopted for national use by many countries as a determinant of socio-economic progress.

Criteria for a country to be included in the HDI rankings.

• Recent, reliable and comparable data for all the three dimensions of the index.

• Statistics should ideally be available from the relevant international data agencies.

Uganda's picture.

• According to the HDR 2013 themed the rise of the south, Uganda is categorized under low human development countries with a computed HDI of 0.456, an improved life expectancy , GNIpc at 54.5 years and $1168 (ppp) respectively.

• Uganda lies 161st in ranking compared to Rwanda at 167 and Kenya at 145 with Norway being in the first position.

Education component (EI)

• It is measured by combing the mean years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age into a single statistic.

• Expected years of schooling estimates (EYSI) are based on enrolment age at all levels of education and population of official school age for all levels of education. Expected years of schooling is capped at 18 years. The indicators are normalized using a minimum value zero and maximum values are set to the actual observed maximum value of mean years of schooling from the countries in the time series 1980-2012, that is 13.3 years estimated for the us in 2010.expected years of schooling is maximized by its cap,18 years.

Educ. Component cont’d

• EYSI=(eys-0)/(20.6-0)• Mean years of schooling (MYSI) is estimated

based on educational attainment data from censuses and surveys available in the UNESCO institute for statistics database and Barro and Lee (2010) methodology.

life expectancy component (LEI)

• It is calculated using a minimum value of 20 years and maximum value of 83.57 years. this is the observed maximum value of the indicators from the countries in the time series, 1980-2012.

Income component (II)

• This component is measured by GNI per capita instead of GDP per capita. it uses the logarithm of income to reflect the diminishing importance of income with increasing GNI

HDI

• The scores from the three components are then combined into a geometric mean to come up with the HDI.

• HDI=(EI*LEI*II)^(1/3)

HDI disaggregation

• Different groups of people may be at different levels of human development. The groups of people may be divided along lines of the income levels, rural or urban residence, geographical location gender and ethnicity.

• It is therefore necessary to develop different HDIs for different groups as listed above to compliment the overall HDI for a country.

Adjusting the HDI for inequalities.

• In 2010, the inequality adjusted HDI (IHDI) was introduced during the revision of the original HDI framework. This was to cover for the inequalities in the distribution of the achievements for each of the three dimensions of the HDI.

• IHDI is equal to HDI if no inequalities existed, thus if all the components have been equally achieved.

• The difference between the HDI and IHDI is the loss in the potential human development due to inequality and can be expressed as a percentage.

Functions of the HDI

• Through HDI disaggregation, policy makers are able to address gaps that exist among different groups of people

• It enables different groups of people to identify and demand for accountability for the different avenues of life which they feel oppressed.

• It is an alternative tool for measuring socio-economic progress alongside per capita income

• it is used to question national policy choices asking how two countries of the same level of GNIpc can have end up with such different HDIs.

Limitations of the HDI

• Difficult  to use HDI to monitor changes in human development in the short run because of its two components , life expectancy and mean years of schooling which change slowly.

• Inappropriate treatment of income lacking year to year comparability.

• No consistency in the formulae used in computations.• It considers on three components and leaves out components

that reflect priorities and problems that are sensitive to the development of people at national and sub national levels.