The human development index
With economic progress and development, often there is social development. The scatter graph indicates that the wealthier someone may be, the healthier they are. This means the The type of relationship/link between two variables. Positive = as one variable increases, so does the other. Negative = as one variable increases, the other decreases. between the two is positive. This is because the more money earned, the more money can be spent on healthcare, such as fighting disease or training more doctors. As health improves, death rates and infant mortality rates (IMRs) fall. Other social indicators also change as a population becomes wealthier, more money is spent on education, and therefore more children spend longer in school and so literacy rates increase.
As a consequence, in order to measure how developed a country is, it is best to use a range of development indicators, both social and economic, the most reliable being the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). HDI is calculated using an average of four development indicators:
- education – average length of schooling years
- education – literacy rate (as percentage of adults who can read)
- gross national income (GNI) per capita (Purchasing power parity. This is a way to balance the exchange rates so that it is easier to compare figures between countries. ) in US dollars
- life expectancy in years
The advantage of using the UN’s HDI as opposed to any single indicator is that it gives the opportunity to identify how socially developed a country is, and not just how wealthy a country may be.
The choropleth map of the world shows the world’s countries divided into their respective HDI scores. An HDI score is always between zero and one. The closer to one, the more developed a country is. The closer to zero, the less developed a country is.