Human Development Index: Difference between revisions

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Economists Hendrik Wolff, Howard Chong and [[Maximilian Auffhammer]] discuss the HDI from the perspective of data error in the underlying health, education and income statistics used to construct the HDI. They have identified three sources of data error which are: (i) data updating, (ii) formula revisions and (iii) thresholds to classify a country's development status. They conclude that 11%, 21% and 34% of all countries can be interpreted as currently misclassified in the development bins due to the three sources of data error, respectively. Wolff, Chong and Auffhammer suggest that the United Nations should discontinue the practice of classifying countries into development bins because the cut-off values seem arbitrary, and the classifications can provide incentives for strategic behavior in reporting official statistics, as well as having the potential to misguide politicians, investors, charity donors and the public who use the HDI at large.<ref name="Wolff et al. 2011" />

In 2010, the UNDP reacted to the criticism by updating the thresholds to classify nations as low, medium, and high human development countries. In a comment to ''[[The Economist]]'' in early January 2011, the Human Development Report Office responded<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.economist.com/user/UNDP%2BHuman%2BDevelopment%2BReport%2BOffice/comments |title=UNDP Human Development Report Office's comments |date=January 2011 |newspaper=The Economist |access-date=12 January 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110211083547/http://www.economist.com/user/UNDP%2BHuman%2BDevelopment%2BReport%2BOffice/comments |archive-date=11 February 2011 |url-status=dead }}</ref> to an article published in the magazine on 6&nbsp;January 2011<ref>{{cite news |url=httphttps://www.economist.com/nodeinternational/17849159?story_id=178491592011/01/06/wrong-numbers |title=The Economist (pages 60–61 in the issue of Jan 8, 2011) |date=6 January 2011 |access-date=12 January 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110113063006/http://www.economist.com/node/17849159?story_id=17849159 |archive-date=13 January 2011 |url-status=live }}</ref> which discusses the Wolff ''et al.'' paper. The Human Development Report Office states that they undertook a systematic revision of the methods used for the calculation of the HDI, and that the new methodology directly addresses the critique by Wolff ''et al.'' in that it generates a system for continuously updating the human-development categories whenever formula or data revisions take place.

In 2013, Salvatore Monni and Alessandro Spaventa emphasized that in the debate of GDP versus HDI, it is often forgotten that these are both external indicators that prioritize different benchmarks upon which the quantification of societal welfare can be predicated. The larger question is whether it is possible to shift the focus of policy from a battle between competing paradigms to a mechanism for eliciting information on well-being directly from the population.<ref name="Monni and Spaventa, 2013">{{cite journal |last1=Monni |first1=Salvatore |last2=Spaventa |first2=Alessandro |year=2013 |title=Beyond Gdp and HDI: Shifting the focus from Paradigms to Politics |journal=Development |volume=56 |issue=2 |pages=227–231 |doi=10.1057/dev.2013.30 |s2cid=84722678 }}</ref>