256 Human Development Index

Psacharopoulos, G. (1992), ‘Poverty and income distribution in Latin America: the story of the 1980s’, Technical
Paper No. 351, Washington, DC: World Bank.
Rajkumar, Andrew S. and Vinaya Swaroop (2002), ‘Public spending and outcomes: does governance matter?’,
World Bank Working Paper no. 2840, World Bank, Washington, DC.
Ranis, Gustav, Frances Stewart and Alejandro Ramirez (2000), ‘Economic growth and human development’,
World Development, 28 (2), 197–219.
Schultz, T. Paul (2000), ‘Productive benefits of improving health: evidence from low-income countries’, Yale
University, mimeo.
Sen, Amartya (1985), ‘Well-being, agency and freedom: the Dewey Lectures 1984’, Journal of Philosophy, 82 (4),
169–221.
Sen, Amartya (2000), ‘A decade of human development’, Journal of Human Development, 1 (1), 17–23.
Srinivasan, T.N. (1994), ‘Human development: a new paradigm or reinvention of the wheel?’, American
Economic Review, 84 (2), 238–43.
Strauss, John (1986), ‘Does better nutrition raise farm productivity?’, Journal of Political Economy, 94 (2),
297–320.
Strauss, John and Duncan Thomas (1998), ‘Nutrition, and economic development’, Journal of Economic
Literature, 36 (2), 766–817.
Streeten, Paul (1979), ‘Basic needs: premises and promises’, Journal of Policy Modelling, 1, 136–46.
Thomas, D. and J. Maluccio (1995), ‘Contraceptive choice, fertility, and public policy in Zimbabwe’, Living
Standard Measurement Survey Working Paper 109, World Bank, Washington, DC.
Thomas, D., J. Strauss and M.H. Henriques (1991), ‘How does mother’s education affect child height’, Journal
of Human Resources, 26, 183–212.
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1990), Human Development Report, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
von Braun, J. (1988), ‘The impact of new crop technology on the agricultural division of labor in a West Africa
setting’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 37, 513–35.
Wolgemuth, J.C., M.C. Latham, A. Hall and D. Crompton (1982), ‘Worker productivity and nutritional status
of Kenyan road construction labourers’, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 36, 68–78.

Human Development Index

The concept of human development draws on the greatness of human potentiality despite
our narrowly circumscribed lives. Lack of schooling, meagre healthcare, inadequate eco-
nomic opportunities, violation of political liberties, denial of civil rights, and other hostile
influences can powerfully limit and frustrate human lives. The perspective of human
development is based on the recognition that the hindrances that people face can be
removed through social efforts as well as individual initiatives.

The human development approach

The Human Development Reports were published by the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), from 1990. The movement was led by the visionary Pakistani
economist, Mahbub ul Haq, who died in 1998. A firm belief in the basic importance of
enriching the lives and freedoms of ordinary human beings has been a central concern in
the social sciences for a very long time. This applies not only to Adam Smith, but also to
earlier writings, even to Aristotle, who argued in Nicomachean Ethics that ‘wealth is evi-
dently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something
else’. We have to judge the success of a society, including its economy, not just in terms of
national wealth or the gross national product (the ubiquitous GNP), but in terms of the
freedoms and capabilities that people enjoy, to live as they would value living.
The broadness of that perspective has often been undermined through seeing develop-
ment in the narrow perspective of expansion of the supply of objects of convenience
 Human Development Index 257

(represented, for example, by the GNP, or the gross domestic product, the GDP). That
expansion is important, but not for its own sake, and we have to take into account the
variability of the relation between economic growth and the expansion of basic human
freedoms and capabilities. It is this relatively neglected heritage that the human develop-
ment approach tries to reclaim. That basic ambition informs the tables and analyses pre-
sented in the Human Development Reports.
By the time Mahbub ul Haq became the pioneering leader of the human development
approach, there were several movements of discontent which were seeking an approach
broader than what standard economic measurement provided. There were development
theorists arguing for the recognition of ‘basic needs’. There were advocates of various
indicators of ‘physical quality of life’. There were writers focusing on disparities in ‘living
conditions’. There were international organisations (even within the UN family, for
example UNICEF) which emphasised the importance of ascertaining ‘the state of the
world’s children’. There were relief organisations, from Oxfam to CARE (Christian
Action for Research and Education), concerned with hunger, morbidity and mortality,
rather than only with income poverty. There were humanists voicing the need for social
justice in the distribution of opportunities that people have. And there were also some
obdurate theory-spinners wondering whether the foundations of economic and social
evaluation could not be radically shifted from commodities to capabilities, thereby
moving the focus of attention from what people own (or have) to what they can actually
do (or be). The human development approach, under Mahbub ul Haq’s stewardship, tried
to make room for all these concerns.

Use of an index of human development

The difficulty, however, of trying to replace a simple and coarse number like the GNP by
an avalanche of tables (and a whole set of related analyses) is that the latter does not have
the handy usability that the crude GNP has. People could make respectful references to
the breadth and reach of the human development approach, and then slip back into
relying only on the GNP when it comes to summary statements. The Human
Development Index (HDI) was devised explicitly as a rival to GNP – indeed as a similarly
coarse measure as the GNP but not oblivious of everything other than products and
incomes. Not surprisingly, it has a boorishness that is somewhat similar to that of the
GNP (for this unflattering description, I hope I would not be accused of being too disres-
pectful of the HDI, which I had a hand in constructing, for Mahbub ul Haq, in late 1989).
By focusing on some of the aspects of human lives – such as longevity and education –
the HDI takes us well beyond the narrow limits of concentrating only on objects of con-
venience. It is a quick and imperfect glance at human lives, which – despite the crudeness
it shares with the GNP – is sensitive, to a significant extent, to the way people live and can
choose to live.
However, the breadth of the human development approach must not be confused with
the slender specificity of the Human Development Index. The latter – the HDI – can
compete with the GNP in terms of ready usability, in a way that the very broad and
sophisticated human development analysis – with many tables and complex concerns –
cannot. This explains why the HDI, despite its rough and unrefined nature, has been used
as something of a flagship of the ‘human development approach’ since its appearance in
258 Human Development Index

the Human Development Report 1990 – the first report of what has been a continuing series
since then.

The components of the HDI

The HDI is based on three components, namely, indicators of basic education, of
longevity and of income per head. It is, thus, not exclusively focused on economic opu-
lence, as is the GNP. In particular, it takes note of the fact that even with the same level
of economic opulence, differences in life expectancy and basic education tend to reflect
significant variations in the quality and reach of human lives. The HDI, thus, serves the
purpose of broadening the limited vision of the GNP and other narrowly income-based
indicators.
The weighting of the three components of the HDI is somewhat arbitrary. There cer-
tainly is more room for public discussion on the weights to be used, and indeed within the
general format of the HDI, the weights attached to the distinct components have been
parametrically varied over the years. The weighting exercise is done implicitly, while stick-
ing formally to putting the same weight on the normalised value of each component. The
maximum and minimum values of each component used in ‘normalising’ the figures (for
example, between a minimal life expectancy and a maximum value) determines what
weight is in effect attached to a given increase in that component. For example, the value
of a one-year increase in life expectancy would be twice as large if the normalisation is
done between 50 and 80 years, compared with taking the limits to be 30 and 90 years.

Education and life expectancy

Within its educational component, the HDI takes note of literacy as well as ongoing
schooling. It is not hard to appreciate that education enhances the ability of people to do
what they value doing. The use of life expectancy has, however, received more critical
attention.
The fact that longevity is very often taken to be a primary accomplishment of a good
society perhaps does relate in some ways to the presumption that people are, in some
sense, ‘happier’ (or ‘more well’) if they live on rather than dying off (at least so long as
they are not too overwhelmed by the debility of old age). But aside from the complexity
of that judgement (an issue of some intellectual antiquity), there are also critically import-
ant issues of freedom that are also linked to longevity. These concerns include not only
the fact that people tend, by and large, to value living longer, but also the central recog-
nition that being alive is typically a necessary requirement for carrying out the plans and
projects that we have reason to value and pursue.
The point was put well by the seventeenth-century English poet, Andrew Marvell, in a
poem dedicated to his ‘coy mistress’:

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

I do not know precisely how coy Marvell’s ‘coy mistress’ was, or whether she liked being
embraced by Andrew Marvell or not. But clearly Marvell sought it, and he was, in general,
right in pointing to the fact that we value life at least partly because of the things we can
 Human Development Index 259

do, if alive. The value of living must reflect the importance of our valued capabilities –
our ability to do what we would like to do – since living is typically a necessary condition
for having those capabilities. This is one of the reasons why the focus on longevity in the
HDI reflects an implicit valuation of human freedom – our capability to do what we value
doing.

Income vis-à-vis the income component of the HDI

However, human capabilities depend not only on longevity and education, but also on
many other factors. By including an income component to the informational basis of the
HDI, note is taken of the relevance of ‘the command over resources to enjoy a decent
standard of living’. This is a concession to the reasons that give relevance to the GNP,
without excluding everything else. Indeed, unlike in the GNP, the income component of
the HDI has a specific and constrained role:

1. it is not the only influence on the HDI, and

2. by incorporating diminishing returns to income in the income component of the
HDI, there is an attempt here to take note of the greater importance of incremental
income near poverty levels (rather than counting the poor person’s precious dollar to
be no more significant than the millionaire’s marginal dollar).

Indeed, there have been attempts, in various Human Development Reports, to reflect dis-
tributive concerns within the measure of the income component of the HDI.

Some limitations of the HDI

Let me end by briefly mentioning some limitations of the HDI. First, the well-being and
freedom that we enjoy have much internal diversity, and they are influenced by a great
variety of factors – political, economic, social, legal, epidemiological and others. These
factors are distinct, but they also interrelate with each other. The HDI is based on a heroic
selection and puts the focus on some of these features, while totally neglecting others. The
problem cannot be rectified by including more factors into this one numerical index, since
the inclusion of more variables reduces the importance of each of the other – already
included – variables. The loss of informational sensitivity involved in moving from a
complex reality to just one number (formally, from an n-tuple or a vector to a scalar)
cannot but be great. Depending on the purpose at hand, the particular informational
focus of any index, like the HDI, may well be contingently justified, but it cannot do
justice to the variety of purposes that can be served by the human development approach
in general.
Second, when the ingredients of a judgement are diverse, any aggregate index with given
weights over its diverse constituent elements would tend to oversimplify the evaluative
exercise. As is well known from indexing theory, much would depend on the questions that
the index is meant to address.
Third, another concern involves the time dimension. We have reason to be interested in
the current situation as well as future prospects. Indeed, sometimes we are particularly
interested in changes over time. For example, if a further spread of AIDS and the unfold-
ing of that pandemic would reduce life expectancy sharply, it would be particularly
260 Human rights

relevant to examine that and also to see how this would tend to restrain or reduce the
future values of HDI, of which life expectancy is a component.
Of course, this is not, in itself, an argument against the HDI as an indicator, since we
can distinguish between different questions, in particular, ‘what is the present situation?’
and ‘what are the prospects of the future?’. But since some commentators seem to be keen
on getting all the different information – concerning the future as well as the present –
through just one real number (through some all-inclusive index), it is worth noting that
any expectation that today’s HDI may adequately reflect both the present situation and
the future prospects would be hard to satisfy.
The usefulness of the HDI is dependent on understanding its purpose and limits. It is
aimed at broadening the informational narrowness of the GNP or GDP. This it does, but
it cannot capture the breadth of the human development approach in general. No one
number can, no matter how much we try to pack into that number.
AMARTYA K. SEN

Further reading
Anand, Sudhir and Amartya Sen (1994), ‘Human development index: methodology and measurement’,
Occasional Paper 12, HDRO, UNDP, New York; reprinted in Fukuda-Parr and Kumar (eds) (2003),
pp. 114–27.
Aristotle (4th Century BC [1980]), The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by David Ross, The World’s Classics,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Desai, Meghnad (1994), Poverty, Famine and Economic Development, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, US:
Edward Elgar.
Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko and A.K. Shiva Kumar (eds) (2003), Readings in Human Development Oxford and New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Grant, James P. (1978), Disparity Reduction Rates in Social Indicators, Washington, DC: Overseas Development
Council.
Griffin, Keith and John Knight (1990), Human Development and the International Development Strategies for the
1990s, London: Macmillan.
Haq, Mahbub ul (1995), Reflections on Human Development, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Morris, Morris D. (1979), Measuring the Conditions of the World’s Poor: The Physical Quality of Life Index,
Oxford: Pergamon.
Nussbaum, Martha (1998), ‘Nature, function and capability: Aristotle on political distribution’, Oxford Studies
in Ancient Greek Philosophy, supplementary vol., 145–84.
Nussbaum, Martha and Amartya Sen (eds) (1993), The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon.
Sen, Amartya (1980), ‘Equality of what?’, in S. McMurren (ed.), Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. I,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 195–220.
Sen, Amartya (1985), Commodities and Capabilities, Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Sen, Amartya (1989), ‘Development as capability expansion’, Journal of Development Planning, 19, 41–58.
Stewart, Frances (1985), Planning to Meet Basic Needs, London: Macmillan.
Streeten, Paul, Shahid J. Burki, Mahbub ul Haq, Norman Hicks and Frances Stewart (1981), First Things First:
Meeting Basic Needs in Developing Countries, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
UNDP (1990), Human Development Report, Oxford: Oxford University Press (published annually since 1990).

Human Rights

Human rights reflect a determined effort to protect the dignity of each and every human
being against abuse of power. This endeavour is as old as human history. What is relatively
new is the international venture for the protection of human dignity through internation-
ally accepted legal standards and generally accessible mechanisms for implementation.
That mission got a major impetus with the founding of the United Nations in 1945.