That poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon is no longer debatable. What remains a contentious issue is whether the various dimensions of individual deprivation should be aggregated--and how these are to be aggregated--into a summary measure of poverty. This study employs the Alkire-Foster...

Our goal is to analyse the inequality aspects of Human Development Index and to propose a new aggregation function that can adjust it by considering inequality penalisation. We take into account inequality across dimensions and across individuals and three laws of inequality penalisation:...

The central question addressed by this study is whether countries with above-average governance grew faster than countries with below-average governance. Using the World Bank's worldwide governance indicators to measure governance performance, it examines whether a country with governance...

The story of South Asia is a topsy-turvy one. Soon after independence from British rule, the region seemed to have a much better prospect than many other parts of the Third World; the prospects soon dimmed, however, as South Asia crawled while East and Southeast Asia galloped away. But a large...

This study takes as its starting point what Gunnar Myrdal had to say about Viet Nam in the context of his seminal work, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968. Myrdal pointed to the decisive nature of the Vietnamese people; and subsequent developments, which are...

Against the backdrop of the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development, this paper analyzes the measurement issues in gender-based indices constructed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and suggests alternatives for choice of variables, functional form, and weights. While the...

In contrast to UNDP’s wildly successful Human Development Index (HDI), UNDP’s gender-related indices have had a rather rocky history. To this day, the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) has not produced a measure that has met the requirements of policy-makers, academics and development...

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...