Human Development Indexes
Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices as they acquire more capabilities and enjoy more opportunities to use those capabilities. But human development is also the objective, so it is both a process and an outcome.
Human development implies that people must influence the process that shapes their lives. In all this, economic growth is an important means to human development, but not the goal.
The human development framework, taking a people-centred approach, changed the lens for viewing development needs, bringing the lives of people to the forefront.
It emphasized that the true aim of development is not only to boost incomes, but also to maximize human choices by enhancing human rights, freedoms, capabilities and opportunities and by enabling people to lead long, healthy and creative lives.

About Human Development Index
• The HDI was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, is anchored in the Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities, often framed in terms of whether people are able to “be” and “do” desirable things in their life, and was published by the United Nations Development Programme.

• The statistic is composed of calculation of life expectancy, education and standard of living, collected at the national level using a predetermined formula. The HDI looks beyond GDP for a better definition of well being.

It provides a composite measure of 3 dimensions of human development.
(i) Living a long and healthy life (measured by life expectancy),
(ii) Having education (measured by literacy and gross enrolment in education);
(iii) Having a decent standard of living (measured by purchased power parity, PPP, income).

The 2010 Report introduces following 3 new indices to capture important aspects of the distribution of well-being for inequality, gender equity and poverty.

a) Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) adjusts the Human Development Index (HDI) for inequality in distribution of each dimension across the population. The IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for this inequality), 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. The “loss” in potential human development due to inequality is given by the difference between the HDI and the IHDI and can be expressed as a percentage.

b) Gender Inequality Index (GII) reflects women’s disadvantage in 3 dimensions-reproductive: health, empowerment and the labour market. The index shows the loss in human development due to inequality between female and male achievements in these dimensions. It ranges from 0, which indicates that women and men fare equally, to 1, which indicates that women fare poorly in all measured dimensions.

c) Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) identifies multiple deprivations at the individual level in health, education and standard of living. It uses micro data from household surveys, and unlike the Inequality adjusted Human Development Index all the indicators needed to construct the measure must come from the same survey. Each person in a given household is classified as poor or non poor depending on the number of deprivations his or her household experiences.

• The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an Inequality-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 inequality),” and “the HDI can be viewed as an index of ‘potential’ human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality).

New Method (2010 Report Onwards)
• Published on 4 November 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011)
• Starting with the 2010 Human Development Report the HDI combines 3 dimensions:
a. A Long and Healthy Life: Life expectancy at birth
b. Education Index: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of schooling
c. A Decent Standard of Living: Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (PPP US$)
• In its 2010 Human Development Report, the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI.

The following 3 indices are used:
1. Life Expectancy Index (LEI)
2. Education Index (EI)
2.1 Mean Years of Schooling Index (MYSI)
2.2 Expected Years of Schooling Index (EYSI)
3. Income Index (II)
Finally, the HDI is the geometric mean of the previous 3 normalized indices:
LE: Life expectancy at birth.
MYS: Mean Years of Schooling (Years that a 25-year-old person or older has spent in schools)
EYS: Expected Years of Schooling (Years that a 5-year-old child will spend with his education in his whole life)
GNIpc: Gross National Income at purchasing power parity per capita.

Other indexes in detail
• Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index
The IHDI takes into account not only the average achievements of a country on health, education and income, but also how those achievements are distributed among its population by “discounting” each dimension’s average value according to its level of inequality.
While the HDI can be viewed as an index of average achievements in human development dimensions, the IHDI measures the level of human development when the distribution of achievements across people in the society is accounted for. The IHDI will be equal to the HDI when there is no inequality, but falls below the HDI as inequality rises. The difference between the HDI and IHDI, expressed as a percentage of the HDI, indicates the loss in human development due to inequality.
The IHDI captures the inequality in distribution of the HDI dimensions. However, it is not association sensitive, meaning that it does not account for overlapping inequalities—whether the same people are at the lower end of each distribution. Also, individual values of education and income can be zero or even negative (for income), so they have been adjusted to non-negative non-zero values uniformly across countries, which reshapes the distributions to a small degree while the Atkinson inequality measure provides an approximation of the magnitude of inequality.

• Gender Inequality Index
The GII is an inequality index. It shows the loss in potential human development due to disparity between female and male achievements in two dimensions, empowerment and economic status, and reflects a country’s position relative to normative ideals for the key dimension of women’s health. Overall, the GII reflects how women are disadvantaged in these dimensions.
There is no country with perfect gender equality – hence all countries suffer some loss in achievements in key aspects of human development when gender inequality is taken into account. The GII is similar in method to the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). It can be interpreted as a combined loss to achievements in reproductive health, empowerment and labour market participation due to gender inequalities. Since the GII includes different dimensions than the HDI, it cannot be interpreted as a loss in HDI itself. The GII ranges between 0 and 1 and higher GII values indicate higher levels of inequalities.
The GII includes reproductive health and goes beyond the literacy and primary education. It also reveals gender disparities in labour market participation, instead of using the flawed sex-disaggregated income measure.