Monday, September 13, 2021

The Human Development Index

The Human Development Index (HDI) was developed by the United Nations to provide a more comprehensive measure of a country's development than purely economic measures (such as the gross domestic product GDP). The HDI looks at health, education and living standards to measure the individual performance of countries and to provide a means to compare how development differs between the countries of the world.

You can view global 2019 HDI rankings on Global Data Lab's Human Development Indices interactive map. The map allows you to view the overall HDI score for sub-national regions around the world and individual scores in the health, education and living standards measures which are used to provide the overall score. The map also allows you to view the Gender Development Index which measures gender gaps in life expectancy, education, and living standards in individual countries. 

The Global Data Lab map shows HDI scores at the regional level. You can view the country level HDI scores on Wikipedia's List of countries by Human Development Index. Norway, Ireland and Switzerland (respectively) make up the top three countries in the 2019 HDI rankings. The USA, which tends to lead the world in most rankings of GDP, is 17th on the 2019 HDI list. This is a drop of three places since the 2015 rankings. Of the 189 countries on the list Niger has the worst ranking. The Central African Republic comes second to last. While Chad is the third worst country on the 2019 HDI list.

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