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8 unusual facts about Human Development Index


Antiguo Cuscatlán

It is also the municipality with the highest Human Development Index in the nation, and in the Central American region according to the latest report by the United Nations.

Capability approach

The capabilities approach has been highly influential in development policy where it has shaped the evolution of the human development index HDI, has been much discussed in philosophy, and is increasingly influential in a range of social sciences.

Subsequently, and in collaboration particularly with political philosopher Martha Nussbaum, development economist Sudhir Anand and economic theorist James Foster, Sen has helped to make the capabilities approach predominant as a paradigm for policy debate in human development where it inspired the creation of the UN's Human Development Index (a popular measure of human development, capturing capabilities in health, education, and income).

The Human Development Index takes into consideration a number of development and well-being factors that are not taken into account in the calculation of GDP and GNP.

European Union statistics

The rankings of the table refer to the UNDP Human Development Report 2013 (2012 data).

Human development

Human Development Index, an index used to rank countries by level of human development

Human Development Index

Economists Hendrik Wolff, Howard Chong and Maximilian Auffhammer discuss the HDI from the perspective of data error in the underlying health, education and income statistics used to construct the HDI.

To produce the Human Development Reports, Mahbub ul Haq brought together a group of well-known development economists including: Paul Streeten, Frances Stewart, Gustav Ranis, Keith Griffin, Sudhir Anand and Meghnad Desai.


Feminist economics

In order to measure well-being more generally, Amartya Sen, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, and other feminist economists helped develop alternatives to Gross Domestic Product, such as the Human Development Index.


see also

Monica Das

She is the author of Her Story So Far: Tales of the Girl Child in India (Penguin, 2003) and The Other Woman (Harper Collins, 2010), an edited volume which draws attention to the issue of the socio-economic impact of underage marriage, bigamy and polygamy on the Human Development index and Gender development index.