The human development index: some technical issues and alternative indices

This paper examines the components and structure of the UNDP's Human Development Index and briefly reviews the criticisms of this index in the literature. It suggests some improvements on the components of the index as well as proposing a different structure for the index itself. These result in a set of alternative indices, based on the same components, for measuring human development. Data from the Human Development Report 1995 are used to test and compare the robustness of all the measures discussed. Furthermore it attempts to establish whether the developed indices based on the components of the HDI have the expected properties of an index or whether they are ‘redundant’ as proposed by some literature. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.