Levels of Human Development

Abstract

Some of the previous chapters were concerned with the measurements of overall or aggregate poverty and others with segmental or sectoral poverty. This brings us to the latest attempt to evolve a measure of overall poverty based upon or derived from sectoral and some general estimates of richness and poverty such as income per capita, education and life expectancy. The aim of this exercise, conducted under the auspices of UNDP, is that despite a summing-up of these three measures, the weighting problem should be avoided in substantial measure. It is to be noted that while the income index is an overall index and the education index is a sectoral index (with wide overall implications), the life expectancy index is itself composed of several socio-economic factors such as health, information, medical facilities, education, literacy, income levels, and so on. While the human development index (HDI) evolved by the UNDP is certainly an improvement on the previous techniques of measuring richness or poverty, it cannot claim to be the last word on poverty estimates. For what it is worth — and it is worth a lot — we use the HDI in the present work for all the 24 countries for two points of time (1985 and 1992) as one of the best available indices of poverty and richness.