This paper aims at providing an ethical framework for rebuilding, reconstructing, restructuring and revitalizing human capabilities as a means to achieve social empowerment. It strives toward conceptualizing a certain set of guidelines built upon a notion of globally common human values. Using...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

This paper explores ways of enlarging the measurement and understanding of Human Development (HD) beyond the relatively reductionist Human Development Index. From the extensive literature on well-being, we derived eleven categories of HD. Within each category, we then identified a potential set...

Recent literature has contrasted Human Development, described as the ultimate goal of the development process, with economic growth, described as an imperfect proxy for more general welfare, or as a means toward enhanced human development. This debate has broadened the definitions and goals of...

This paper explores the two-way relationships between Economic Growth (EG) and Human Development (HD), building on an earlier work by Ranis, Stewart, and Ramirez (2000). Here, we show that HD is not only a product of EG but also an important input to it. The paper develops new empirical...

Over the last few years, environmental issues have entered into policy design, particularly development and growth policies. Natural resources are considered necessary production inputs and environmental quality is considered a welfare determinant. The integration of environmental issues into...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that it does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. We use a simple approach, which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows to compare the...

The concept of convergence is extended to the human development index. Evidence of weak absolute convergence is found over 1975-2002. The results are robust and verified by various conditional -convergence models and also supported by the evidence of weak -convergence. Population weighted...