Social indicators and comparisons of living standards

Construction of an international index of standards of living, incorporating social indicators and economic output, typically involves scaling and weighting procedures that lack welfare-economic foundations. Revealed preference axioms can be used to make quality-of-life comparisons if we can estimate the representative household's production technology for the social indicators. This method is applied to comparisons of gross domestic product (GDP) and life expectancy for 58 countries. Neither GDP rankings, nor the rankings of the Human Development Index (HDI), are consistent with the partial ordering of revealed preference. A method of constructing a utility-consistent index incorporating both consumption and life expectancy is suggested.     

ASSESSING THE ROBUSTNESS OF COMPOSITE INDICES RANKINGS

Ranking objects in terms of different attributes is a crucial practice that is typically sensitive to the choice of attributes' weights. In this paper we present rigorous methods to assess the extent to which the weight‐based rankings are robust to the choice of alternative weights. Empirical illustrations are provided, showing the robustness of country rankings arising from the values of the UNDP Human Development Index, the Gender‐related Development Index, or the Human Poverty Index among others. The ideas and techniques presented in this paper can be used to assess the reliability of multiattribute rankings.     

我国各地区经济社会发展的综合测度分析——基于HDI的研究

本文应用联合国提出的人类发展指数（HDI）概念,从经济、教育和健康水平3个方面综合测度我国31个省（市、自治区）1994年以来的经济社会发展状况。对各省区历年人类发展指数进行了估算．并对其变动趋势进行了深入分析。对各地区的人类发展水平进行了初步的国际比较,为有效衡量各省区经济发展成效以及客观评价各省市可持续发展状况提供了新的视角。     

我国政府支出对人类发展指数影响的经验分析

文章用我国国家财政支出和预算外支出度量政府支出,计算出政府支出的增长率作为我国财政政策变动的代理变量,用我国的人类发展指数度量人类发展状况.对数据整理后,形成政府支出增长率和人类发展指数变动的时间序列.使用计量经济学的方法考察了政府支出变动对人类发展指数变动的影响,在借鉴其他学者对政府支出和经济增长关系研究成果的基础上,得出的基本结论是:在1990-2003年间,我国财政政策的变动和人类发展指数的变动没有显著的相关关系,二者之间也不能相互解释,我国财政政策依然是以拉动经济增长为政策偏向的,考虑财政政策变动的时滞,发现其对我国人类发展指数的影响为负.     

Measuring Socio-Economic GENDER Inequality: Toward an Alternative to the UNDP Gender-Related Development Index

This paper assesses the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) Gender-Related Development Index (GDI). Although the GDI has increased attention on gender equality in human development, it suffers from several limitations. A major problem is that it conflates relative gender equality with absolute levels of human development and thus gives no information on comparative gender inequality among countries. Using the same indicators as the GDI, the paper constructs a Relative Status of Women (RSW) index, which demonstrates how using a measure of gender equality that abstracts from levels of development results in very different country rankings. However, the RSW is not an ideal measure of gender inequality. The GDI indicators are not the most appropriate ones for measuring gender inequality and hence both the RSW and the GDI have limited validity. The paper concludes by offering a conceptual framework that provides the basis for an alternative measure of gender inequality.     

An Axiomatic Foundation of the Multiplicative Human Development Index

The aggregation formula in the Human Development Index (HDI) was changed to a geometric mean in 2010. In this paper, we search for a theoretical justification for employing this new HDI formula. First, we find a maximal class of index functions, what we call quasi‐geometric means, that satisfy symmetry for the characteristics, normalization, and separability. Second, we show that power means are the only quasi‐geometric means satisfying homogeneity. Finally, the new HDI is the only power mean satisfying minimal lower boundedness, which is a local complementability axiom proposed by Herrero et al. (2010).     

基于主成分分析法的人类发展指数替代技术

在本文中,我们采用基于协方差的主成分分析法来分析1990年以来UNDP发布的中国人类发展数据,然后采用Spearman秩相关系数来分析获得的主成分与HDI之间的关系。研究表明,主成分分析法不仅能够有效地替代传统的人类发展指数编制方法,其形成的动态权重结构还可以有效地透视人类发展差距模式的历史演进过程,以及人类发展的各个方面(如预期寿命、知识教育和体面的生活等)在整体发展进程中的角色变化。对中国人类发展数据的分析结果也表明,尽管1990年以来中国各地区在经济、教育和健康方面均取得了重大进步,但三项发展之间存在着严重的不协调,地区发展差距也越来越多地体现为经济发展差距,这些反映了改革开放以来中国各级政府过分强调经济增长而带来的片面、不协调的人类发展。实现经济社会的协调发展,是时代的要求,也是当前我国各级政府面临的主要任务。而强调公共服务职能、推动地方政府的服务型转型,是消除不平衡发展的关键。     

Endogenous categorization of the human development

The human development index (HDI) is one of the most well-known measures of welfare. We apply clustering techniques to endogenously determine how similar countries are with respect to the HDI, and into how many categories they can be classified. We find that, in contrast to the usual assumption in the United Nations’ Human Development Reports, the number of categories is not fixed and has varied over time, from three in 1990 to four in 2014. We also find that the countries within each category differ from the United Nation’s proposal.     

我国区域残疾现患率与人类发展指数相关性研究

根据第二次全国残疾人抽样调查(2006)以及2006年全国统计年鉴等相关数据资源, 分别计算反映我国不同区域残疾水平的残疾现患率指标, 以及反映我国不同区域社会经济发展水平的人类发展指数指标。探求残疾的罹患与社会经济发展之间的相关关系, 证明不同社会经济水平条件下, 残疾罹患水平具有区域差异性。在理论和实际两个方面为不同社会经济水平地区的残疾人保障和康复扶助工作提供了指导和政策支持。     

福利水平的可持续性评价研究

在设计福利水平的评价指标和可持续发展评价指标时,一些评价福利水平的指标忽视了可持续性,而评价可持续发展的指标则忽略了当前的福利水平。长期以来,人们一方面试图用一个单一的指标来综合反映可持续发展和福利水平两个方面的内容;另一方面,也在探讨不将两方面的内容完全综合为一个指标的情况下,如何结合应用两个方面的测度指标。本文首先针对第一方面的问题以ISEW为例进行述评;其次,述评第二方面的不同建议;再次,提出将真实储蓄率作为可持续指标,并以此来评判福利水平的可持续性。     

Happiness and the Human Development Index: Australia Is Not a Paradox

In ‘Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia’, Blanchflower and Oswald (2005) observe an apparent puzzle: they claim that Australia ranks highly in the Human Development Index (HDI), but relatively poorly in happiness. However, when we compare their happiness data with the HDI, Australia appears happier, not sadder, than its HDI score would predict. This conclusion also holds when we turn to a larger cross‐national dataset than the one used by Blanchflower and Oswald, when we analyse life satisfaction in place of happiness, and when we measure development using Gross Domestic Product per capita in place of the HDI. Indeed, in the World Values Survey, only one other country (Iceland) has a significantly higher level of both life satisfaction and happiness than Australia. Our findings accord with numerous cross‐national surveys conducted since the 1940s, which have consistently found that Australians report high levels of well‐being.     

谈人类发展指数的理论评价与应用

人类发展指数(HDI)从人本主义出发,取代传统的片面追求经济增长,单纯比较人均GDP的方法,更加全面科学地为各国的发展实践提供了衡量的标准;同时,可以通过对这个指标体系中各项分指标进行分析比较,发现与别国的差距,以进一步改良政策,使本国的经济和社会都能够更健康地发展,尤其无论从理论上还是指标设计上都可以为我国建设和谐社会和实现经济可持续性发展的目标服务.就人类发展指标体系的创建进行阐述,然后对其包含的发展思想进行理论评价,最后以中国的发展实践中存在的问题进一步证明研究和重视人类发展指数的意义.     

Troubling tradeoffs in the Human Development Index

The 20th Human Development Report introduced a new version of its famous Human Development Index (HDI), which aggregates country-level attainments in life expectancy, schooling and income. The main change was to relax the past assumption of perfect substitutability between its components. Most users will not, however, realize that the new HDI has also greatly reduced its implicit weight on longevity in poor countries, relative to rich ones. By contrast, the new HDI's valuations of extra schooling are now very high—many times the economic returns. An alternative index is proposed that embodies less troubling tradeoffs while still allowing imperfect substitution.     

Measuring sustainable development — Nation by nation

Sustainable development represents a commitment to advancing human well-being, with the added constraint that this development needs to take place within the ecological limits of the biosphere. Progress in both these dimensions of sustainable development can be assessed: we use the UN Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of development and the Ecological Footprint as an indicator of human demand on the biosphere. We argue that an HDI of no less than 0.8 and a per capita Ecological Footprint less than the globally available biocapacity per person represent minimum requirements for sustainable development that is globally replicable. Despite growing global adoption of sustainable development as an explicit policy goal, we find that in the year 2003 only one of the 93 countries surveyed met both of these minimum requirements. We also find an overall trend in high-income countries over the past twenty five years that improvements to HDI come with disproportionately larger increases in Ecological Footprint, showing a movement away from sustainability. Some lower-income countries, however, have achieved higher levels of development without a corresponding increase in per capita demand on ecosystem resources.     

Do the Spanish regions converge? A unit root analysis for the HDI of the Spanish regions

This article studies the possible stochastic convergence between the Spanish regions in 1980–2010. The application of unit root techniques to the new Human Development Index recently calculated in Herrero et al. (2013) allows us to show that the evolution of the Spanish economy can be better understood as the sum of divergent forces rather than as a group of convergent regions. Similar conclusions can be drawn when the per capita GDP is used, although these two variables exhibit different patterns of behaviour at the end of the sample. Finally, we also observe that the distance between northern and southern regions has increased since 2000.     

使用人类发展指数对中国城乡差距的一种估计

本文在收集整理反映我国城乡收入、教育和出生时预期寿命差别数据的基础上 ,利用UNDP的人类发展指数法计算了按城乡分的收入指数、教育指数和出生时预期寿命指数 ,并进一步构建了按城乡分的人类发展指数。基本结论是 ,自 2 0世纪 90年代以来 ,城乡收入差距始终是最大的 ,而且呈现出整体扩大的趋势 ;城乡教育差距要小于收入的差距 ,城乡教育上的差距呈现出整体缩小的趋势 ,差距扩大主要表现在义务教育以后的阶段 ;城乡人口出生时预期寿命指数间的差距始终是最小的 ,然而这个差距却在扩大。     

Religion,economics and politics: The Bishops and Keynes in the post-Keynesian ERA

This paper makes a proposal for reintroducing sociological or social economics into contemporary economic science. Such a reintroduction is proposed to be substantive, by analyzing the social structuring of the economy, and formal, by including sociological/social economics in the current (JEL) classification system of economic disciplines (code A.15). Both epistemological and ontological arguments can be presented to support the proposal. Epistemological arguments invoke the presence of essential components of sociological economics in the development of economic thought, and ontological arguments stress the role of social factors in economic life. In this paper I present primarily epistemological (theoretical-methodological) arguments for sociological economics, and secondarily ontological ones. I show that the present designation, sociology of economics, is something different from sociological or social economics in that the former refers to economic epistemology (knowledge) and the latter to economic ontology (reality). I conclude that, in addition to a sociology of economic science, we need a sociology of economic life.     

Maximizing human development

The Human Development Index (HDI) is widely used as a measure of well‐being. We examine the allocations implied by the maximization of this index using a standard growth model. Maximization leads to consumption (excluding education and health expenditures) being pushed to minimal levels. It also leads to the overaccumulation of education and/or health capital and possibly physical capital, relative to the standard golden rule. We propose an alternative specification for the HDI, where consumption replaces income as a proxy for decent standard of living. Maximization of this alternative implies a ‘human development golden rule’ which balances consumption, education and health expenditure. We advocate the method of optimization subject to constraints for revealing the policy implications of taking an achievement measure and its underlying philosophy seriously.     

关中—天水经济区人类发展水平空间差异分析

以人类发展指数(HDI)为测度指标,利用HDI计算公式及ESDA方法,对关中-天水经济区65个区县的人类发展水平进行空间差异分析及空间关联分类。关中-天水经济区人类发展水平大多数处于中下水平,且区域差异明显,呈现由市辖区向周边区县递减的分布特点;构成人类发展指数的三个指标中预期寿命指数和教育指数的区域差异较小,而GDP指数区域差异大;关中-天水各区县的人类发展指数存在较强的正的空间相关性,西安市的雁塔区、未央区、莲湖区、碑林区等9个区县成为高-高聚集型区县的显著性聚集区,而天水市的张家川、清水县、秦安县和宝鸡市的陇县等6个区县成为低-低聚集型的最显著区域。针对关中-天水经济区人类发展水平的区域差异,提出相应的政策建议。