Meant by human development index

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well- being, especially child welfare.

It is used to distinguish whether the country is a developed, a developing or an underdeveloped country, and also to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life. The index was developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Indian economist Amartya Sen.

A long and healthy life: Life expectancy at birth Access to knowledge: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of schooling A decent standard of living: GNI per capita (PPP US$) The HDI combined three dimensions up until its 2009 report: Life expectancy at birth, as an index of population health and longevity, knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio (with one-third weighting).

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Standard of living, as indicated by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity. In its 2010 Human Development Report the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI. The following three indices are used:

MYS: Mean years of schooling (Years that a 25 year old person spent in schools)

EYS: Expected years of schooling (Years that a 5 year old child will spend with his education in his whole life)

GNI pc: Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita. This is the methodology used by the UNDP up until its 2009 report.

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The formula defining the HDI is promulgated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In general, to transform a raw variable, say x, into a unit-free index between 0 and 1 (which allows different indices to be added together), the following formula is used:

Where min (x) and max (x) are the lowest and highest values the variable x can attain, respectively.

The Human Development Index (HDI) then represents the uniformly weighted sum with 7 contributed by each of the following factor indices:

Other organizations companies may include Democracy Index, Population, etc. which produces different number of HDI.