Human Development Report 2010: a time for reflection Consultation on Human Development Measurement Rabat, Morocco January

Initial ideas for new or revised measures Create a dashboard consisting of – The main composite measures (revised) HDI and its trends HDI adjusted for inequalities including gender new measure(s) of multi-dimensional poverty new or revised gender measures? additional measures – empowerment, sustainability? – A broader set of statistics and indicators on the dimensions of human development ( 7-8 themes ) – A more detailed set of statistics – in particular those used to calculate the composite measures 2

Revising the HDI Options : – Maintain 3-dimensional HDI, with improvements. eg better education measure – Expand to include additional dimensions, to measure: Inequality in human development Sustainability of human development – What to do with agency and empowerment? Clearly an important additional dimension, but… Subject to contentious issues of definition and measurement. Fundamentally a different type of capability? 3

Issues under consideration What is the purpose of the HDI? – Responsive to policy changes? or – A measure of current status of human development? Which indicators for the existing dimensions of the HDI? – Characteristics (eg input, outputs, outcomes; stocks v flows) – Better measures of quality rather than amounts – Better discrimination between countries 4

Issues under consideration How to construct the dimension indices – Remove ‘caps’ on certain indicators (eg GDP per capita)? – Log health and/or education dimensions (as well as income)? – Should there be a larger penalty on income than health or education? – Different indicators for different groups of countries (to better discriminate)? If so, how to combine to create a single HDI? 5

Issues under consideration How to combine the dimension indices to create the HDI – Currently simple arithmetic mean But this implies perfect substitutability between dimensions – In future, a geometric or harmonic mean? Other issues – Robustness – Weights of indicators and/or dimensions – Presentation of results 6

Other developments Inequality-adjusted HDI New or revised gender measures New measure of multi-dimensional poverty New measures of other dimensions of human development – empowerment, sustainability 7