Introducing the DHDI
What is Human DeveIopment Index?
The UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) was created in 1990 as an alternative to GDP. In the words of its ‘founder’ Mahbub-ul-Haq, it was the culmination of a long search for a more comprehensive measure of development that could capture all, or many more, of the choices people make – a measure that would serve as a better yardstick of the socio-economic progress of nations.” The HDI ranks countries based on how well they do on three variables associated with development – health, education, and per capita income. For over three decades now, the Human Development Index (HDI) has been both embraced and critiqued as a measure of development.
Unaddressed shortcoming of the HDI:
An early critique of the HDI by the Indian economist T.N. Srinivasan was that it had “serious problems of non-comparability over time and space, measurement errors, and biases.” Over the years, the initial HDI has undergone many changes to accommodate criticisms of what was measured and how it was measured. These changes have resulted in many HDI siblings, including the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, the Gender Development Index, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, etc. However, there has been no good modification to the HDI to deal with issues of comparability across time.
How does the DHDI improve upon the HDI?
We present a dynamic index – the Dynamic HDI - which captures the performance of countries across time while preserving the spirit of the underlying rationale for the HDI (which is to look beyond just GDP as a measure of development). The DHDI ranks countries based on their combined improvement in the variables used to calculate the HDI. It tells us how well countries are improving based on the variables of development that are used, rather than simply telling us how well countries are doing. In the words of its developers, “It is putting development in the Human Development Index.”
The HDI ranks countries based on how fast they run. The DHDI ranks countries based on how much they improve in their running speeds.
If you want to compare DHDI rankings of countries not included in the chart below, click here
The visualization below compares the DHDI ranking to the HDI ranking throughout 2004 to 2019 for all the countries in the world. You can filter out different regions and observe how the countries in that region fair over time in terms of HDI and DHDI rankings.
For example, if you look at Eastern and South Eastern Asian countries from 2014 to 2019, you can see how they move from the Low DHDI quadrants to the High DHDI and High HDI quadrant in the span of those 5 years, indicating an improvement in human development which reflects in their DHDI ranking.
