Human Development Index (HDI)

The Human Development Index (HDI) – developed in 1990 -  is an index combining normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is claimed as a standard means of measuring human development — a concept that, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc. The basic use of HDI is to rank countries by level of "human development", which usually also implies to determine whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country.

The HDI combines three basic dimensions:

• Life expectancy at birth, as an index of population health and longevity
• Knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).
• Standard of living, as measured by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in United States dollars.

A HDI below 0.5 is considered to represent "low development". For 2007/08, all 22 countries in that category are located in Africa. The highest-scoring Sub-Saharan countries, Gabon and South Africa, are ranked 119th and 121st, respectively.

 A HDI of 0.8 or more is considered to represent "high development". This includes all developed countries, such as those in North America, Western Europe, Oceania, and Eastern Asia, as well as some developing countries in Eastern Europe, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula.

On the following table, green arrows (▲) represent an increase in ranking over the previous study, while red arrows (▼) represent a decrease in ranking. They are followed by the number of spaces they moved. Blue dashes (▬) represent a nation that did not move in the rankings since the previous study.  (Based on 2005-data)

High

Medium

Low

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