Measuring Quality of Life in Macedonia - Using Human Development Indicators

By the end of the 1980s, the central issue of development was focused on the growth of income and not on the growth of quality of life. Therefore, the development strategies were oriented towards production and left no significant space for improving the welfare of individuals. In the beginning of the 1990s, the human development concept emerged, stressing that economic development ultimately should result in growth of quality of life of individuals, while the goal of the development process was to expand the capabilities of individuals by placing them in the focus of the efforts for development. This paper if focused on the quality of life of the individuals. Moreover, in addition to the previous practice in Macedonia of calculating the human development index (HDI) - as a measure of quality of life, an attempt will be made to calculate the human poverty index (HPI-2) - as a measure of non-income poverty, gender development index (GDI) - as a measure of inequality between men and women, as well as the human development index at the level of aggregated urban and rural municipalities. We hope that it will contribute to the improvement of the quality of decisions made by the state and local authorities in Macedonia when it comes to issues concerning the human development