Abstract
This paper provides an alternative way of measuring human development that takes explicitly into account the differences in the countries’ population structures. The interest of this proposal stems from two complementary elements. First, that there is an enormous diversity in the population structures of those countries analysed in the Human Development Reports, particularly the shares of old people in the population. Second, that demographic characteristics are relevant in the evaluation of development possibilities. We propose to change the way of measuring health, education and material wellbeing, in order to take into account those differences in the population structures. Regarding the health component, we substitute Life Expectancy at Birth by Life Potential (the average life expectancy of the current population); concerning education, we change the average between Mean Years of Schooling and Expected Years of Schooling by the Education Potential (a variable that mimics life potential in this context). As for the material well-being, we propose using the Gross National Income per adult, instead of per capita, while keeping logs in the evaluation. The resulting indicator, called Demographically Adjusted Human Development Index, is the geometric mean of the three new variables suitably normalised. We analyse empirically the effect induced by these changes in the evaluation of human development by comparing this way of measurement with the conventional Human Development Index (HDI) for 168 countries.
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Notes
There were also substantial changes in the design of some complementary measures, particularly regarding poverty.
We depart here from the HDI normalization strategy because the use of max and min goalposts induces some inconsistencies in the aggregation process, as discussed in Herrero et al. (2012).
This is so for a reason: avoiding the composition effect that derives from the use of mortality rates.
The groups are: [0,1], [2,4], [5,9], [10,14],..., [95,99], [100,\(\infty\)].
For the LEB we have used the data provided by United Nations for 2015.
Even though the LP and the LEB are not correlated, when we restrict to particular areas like Europe we observe that both variables are related (\(\rho =0.82\)).
For the MYS we have used the data from the United Nations in 2015. The rest of the variables are obtained from the dataset the UNESCO Institute for Statistics provided by the World Bank, and, for each country, they refer to the last available data in the database. As in the case of health, the data on the population are obtained from the US Census Bureau.
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Acknowledgements
The first author acknowledges financial support from Project ECO2015-65820-P (MINECO/FEDER,UE). The second author also wishes to acknowledge financial support from Project ECO2017-86245-P (MINECO/FEDER/UE), as well as Junta de Andalucía under Project SEJ426. The third author acknowledges financial support from Project ECO2015-65408-R (MINECO/FEDER/UE)
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See Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.
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Herrero, C., Martínez, R. & Villar, A. Population Structure and the Human Development Index. Soc Indic Res 141, 731–763 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1852-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1852-0