HOW SHOULD WE MEASURE THE “ECONOMIC” ASPECTS OF WELL‐BEING?

The Human Development Index (HDI) uses GDP per capita to measure “command over resources,” which implicitly makes the strong value judgment that inequality and insecurity do not matter. This paper presents revised estimates of the Index of Economic Well‐Being (IEWB) for the United States, the U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden for the period 1980 to 2001 and demonstrates that replacing an index of the log per capita incomes with our IEWB as the “command over resources” component in the Human Development Index (HDI) affects the level and trend of the HDI, even among affluent nations. Because the IEWB recognizes four dimensions of command over resources (Current effective per capita Consumption flows, Net societal Accumulation of stocks of productive resources, Income Distribution and Economic Security), its use has a particularly large impact where underlying trends in these components diverge (e.g. the U.K. or the United States).     

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.     

Measuring human development: a stochastic dominance approach

We consider a weighting scheme that yields a best-case scenario for measured human development such as the official equally-weighted Human Development Index (HDI) using an approach that relies on consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency. We compare the official equally-weighted HDI to all possible indices constructed from a set of individual components to obtain the most optimistic scenario for development. In the best-case scenario index education is weighted considerably more than the other two components, per capita income and life expectancy, relative to the weight that it gets in the official equally-weighted index. It also turns out that the improvement in the official HDI is mainly driven by improvements over time in the education index, the component moving fastest relative to its targets, when compared with per capita income and life expectancy. We find that the best-case scenario hybrid index leads to a marked improvement of measured development over time when compared with the official equally-weighted HDI.     

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.     

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).     

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.     

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。     

Human development and decentralization: The importance of public health expenditure

In this article, we empirically analyze the impact of central and subnational government spending on human development in a sample of 57 developed and developing countries over the period 2000–18. Specifically, we focus on the effects of health and education public expenditure on the Human Development Index (HDI) and its dimensions (life expectancy, education, and income). Applying data panel analysis, our empirical evidence shows the importance of central and subnational government health expenditure positively impacting on HDI and each of its components, while in the case of the education expenditure, this positive effect is only confirmed on the educational dimension of HDI. Our study shows how governments can stimulate human development, improving the well-being of citizens, by allocating more resources to healthcare through the different administrative levels.     

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.     

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。     

A New Approach to Human Development Index

Human development Index (HDI) was introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990. For the first four years UNDP used the maximum and the minimum values of the data series to standardize the variables. In 1994 the procedure of standardization was modified with the introduction of arbitrary fixed minimum and maximum values for each variable. Both methods have merits and demerits. The present study proposes an alternative measure of estimating HDI which bridges the gap between the methods of computing HDI proposed by the UNDP in 1990 and 1994. This study also incorporates unadjusted per capita real gross domestic product (PCRGDP) instead of adjusted PCRGDP used by the UNDP. The data from the Human Development Report (HDR) 2000 for 174 countries are used to test the robustness of the suggested index and the results are compared to those of the HDI. Also average values for full sample as well as top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent are offered to show the superiority of our method to that of the UNDP's HDI.     

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.     

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.     

Making development simple. The genetic deterministic hypothesis for economic development

This paper discusses the dangers inherent in attempting to simplify something as complex as development. It does this by exploring the Lynn and Vanhanen theory of deterministic development which asserts that varying levels of economic development seen between countries can be explained by differences in ‘national intelligence’ (national IQ). Assuming that intelligence is genetically determined, and as different races have been shown to have different IQ, then they argue that economic development (measured as GDP/capita) is largely a function of race and interventions to address imbalances can only have a limited impact. The paper presents the Lynne and Vanhanen case and critically discusses the data and analyses (linear regression) upon which it is based. It also extends the cause–effect basis of Lynne and Vanhanen's theory for economic development into human development by using the Human Development Index (HDI). It is argued that while there is nothing mathematically incorrect with their calculations, there are concerns over the data they employ. Even more fundamentally it is argued that statistically significant correlations between the various components of the HDI and national IQ can occur via a host of cause–effect pathways, and hence the genetic determinism theory is far from proven. The paper ends by discussing the dangers involved in the use of over-simplistic measures of development as a means of exploring cause–effect relationships. While the creators of development indices such as the HDI have good intentions, simplistic indices can encourage simplistic explanations of under-development.     

Happiness convergence in transition countries

The “transition happiness gap” has been one of the most robust findings in the literature on life satisfaction. Until very recently, scholars using various datasets have shown that residents of post-communist countries were significantly less satisfied with their lives than their counterparts in non-transition countries (controlling for income and other socio-economic characteristics). The literature has explained this finding by the great macroeconomic instability of the 1990s, by a substantial decrease in the quality and accessibility of public goods, by the major increase in inequality, and by the rapid depreciation of pre-transition human capital. All these factors were expected to subside over time – at least after the post-Great-Recession recovery. In this paper, we consider two most recent datasets – the third wave of the Life in Transition Survey (administered in 2015–16) and the 2010–2016 waves of the annual Gallup World Poll. We find that by 2016 the transition happiness gap had closed. This convergence has taken place both due to a “happiness recovery” in post-communist countries after the Great Recession and due to a decrease in life satisfaction in comparator countries in recent years. We also find that the convergence in life satisfaction was primarily driven by middle-income young, educated individuals, regardless of gender.     

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.     

Spatial heterogeneity in the wage curve

Blanchflower and Oswald argue that the wage curve is a predictable empirical relationship with the “unemployment elasticity of pay” of about −0.1. Using GWR I find evidence of significant spatial heterogeneity in the unemployment elasticity of pay for US counties.     

Life Satisfaction and Longevity: Longitudinal Evidence from the German Socio‐Economic Panel

We investigate the relationship between life satisfaction and mortality using the German Socio‐Economic Panel, which allows us to follow around 15,000 people for more than two decades. Seventeen per cent of the respondents surveyed in 1984 died between 1984 and 2007. After controlling for initial health conditions, we find that people's life satisfaction at the beginning of the survey is deeply linked to their life expectancy: a ten per cent increase in life satisfaction is connected to a four per cent decline in the probability of death in the period studied. The relationship between life satisfaction and mortality is stronger for the married and the men but life satisfaction does not matter for the women. We find some suggestive evidence that links between life satisfaction and mortality could be operating via accidents and mental health. Finally, we show that the life satisfaction measured in 1984 extends to the rest of life: people who were happier in 1984 more frequently experienced high levels of happiness in the rest of their lives. These results suggest that life satisfaction is a powerful risk‐factor for later mortality and is more predictive of mortality than a host of other variables.     

Adjusted net saving and welfare change

The World Bank has estimated Adjusted net (or genuine) saving (ANS) as a macro level index of sustainable development. ANS extends the conventional net saving by adding human capital accumulation and deducting natural resources losses. This paper tests ANSas an index of sustainable development. It examines whether ANS explains changes in welfare. Welfare is measured by Infant mortality rate (IMR) and Human Development Index (HDI). The study was conducted in 36 selected developing and developed countries and covers the period 1971-2000. The results suggest a positive and significant relationship between Adjusted net saving and aggregate welfare but weak in magnitude.     

Happiness, geography and the environment

In recent years, economists have been using socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics to explain self-reported individual happiness or satisfaction with life. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), we employ data disaggregated at the individual and local level to show that while these variables are important, consideration of amenities such as climate, environmental and urban conditions is critical when analyzing subjective well-being. Location-specific factors are shown to have a direct impact on life satisfaction. Most importantly, however, the explanatory power of our happiness function substantially increases when the spatial variables are included, highlighting the importance of the role of the spatial dimension in determining well-being.