The measurement of economic and social development is one of the most hotly contested subjects in economics. Since the 1970s, it has become evident that it is necessary to use a composite index to capture various aspects of social and human development and to address related issues of...

It is shown that the component statistics of the HDI are highly correlated with one another. An implication of this correlation is that a wide range of index weights produce indexes that are statistically identical to the HDI. Indexes with only two of the three HDI components are very highly...

The United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI) has become a standard international measure of development. However, it has been criticized on several grounds. This paper investigates how robust the HDI is to changing two contentious aspects: the component statistics and...

This study introduces two new uses for the development index concept by making use of a variant of the well-known Human Development Index (HDI). Specifically, a modified HDI is estimated using the principal components method of factor analysis. The results will be used to investigate differences...

This paper presents a principal components methodology (based on Ram (1982) and Srinivasan (1994)) for determining the weights for a set of indicators in a composite index of development. The procedure is applied to a 36 variable data set consisting of 1990 data for 19 Latin American countries...