Transcript Human Development on the Move: Key Ideas and Work Plan

Human Development Report 2010:
a time for reflection
Consultation on Human Development Measurement
Rabat, Morocco
16-17 January 2010
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Initial ideas for new or revised measures
Create a dashboard consisting of
– The main composite measures
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(revised) HDI and its trends
HDI adjusted for inequalities including gender
new measure(s) of multi-dimensional poverty
new or revised gender measures?
additional measures – empowerment, sustainability?
– A broader set of statistics and indicators on the
dimensions of human development (7-8 themes)
– A more detailed set of statistics – in particular
those used to calculate the composite measures
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Revising the HDI
• Options :
– Maintain 3-dimensional HDI, with improvements.
• eg better education measure
– Expand to include additional dimensions, to measure:
• Inequality in human development
• Sustainability of human development
– What to do with agency and empowerment? Clearly an
important additional dimension, but…
• Subject to contentious issues of definition and
measurement.
• Fundamentally a different type of capability?
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Issues under consideration
• What is the purpose of the HDI?
– Responsive to policy changes? or
– A measure of current status of human
development?
• Which indicators for the existing
dimensions of the HDI?
– Characteristics (eg input, outputs, outcomes;
stocks v flows)
– Better measures of quality rather than amounts
– Better discrimination between countries
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Issues under consideration
• How to construct the dimension indices
– Remove ‘caps’ on certain indicators (eg GDP per
capita)?
– Log health and/or education dimensions (as
well as income)?
– Should there be a larger penalty on income
than health or education?
– Different indicators for different groups of
countries (to better discriminate)? If so, how to
combine to create a single HDI?
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Issues under consideration
• How to combine the dimension indices to
create the HDI
– Currently simple arithmetic mean
• But this implies perfect substitutability between
dimensions
– In future, a geometric or harmonic mean?
• Other issues
– Robustness
– Weights of indicators and/or dimensions
– Presentation of results
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Other developments
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Inequality-adjusted HDI
New or revised gender measures
New measure of multi-dimensional poverty
New measures of other dimensions of
human development – empowerment,
sustainability
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