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Abstract
In criticizing the nature of the Human Development Index, this paper proposes a different way of constructing the HDI in terms of capturing the pure flow of human development in the areas of material well-being, health, and education. Our comparison of the HDIF and the HDI shows that measuring human development with flow variables provides a better human development performance in terms of health and education than the traditional measure which is a mixture of stock and flow variables.
Notes
We appreciate the financial support from National Science Foundation of China (71303200) and Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (12YJC790263). We are grateful to anonymous referees for their invaluable suggestion.
1 As a metaphor, what if Doctoral students are admitted based on their cumulative GPA since kindergarten? That would be what a “stock” measure implies. In contrast, a flow-based measure would evaluate the applicant based on student performance in the last two years of undergraduate studies.
2 The classification of regions is consistent with the one used in various Human Development Reports commissioned by UNDP.
3 The main reason the sample period ended at 2007 is to avoid the disruptive effect of the sub-prime crisis.
4 The timing of this improved development is intriguing, as the initial upswing appeared right after the Iraq-Kuwait war, while the acceleration is more reflective of the fall of Saddam Hussein and perhaps leading into the Arab Spring. More comprehensive analysis of this region's development is certainly worthwhile.
5 Selected countries in each group are shown in . Please contact authors for more information.
6 As China has gained much notoriety mainly due to her economic performance, interested readers can refer to CitationHou (2011a, Citation2011b) for a general discussion on the success and potential problems down the road. For some insight into China's political governance, refer to CitationLi and Lin (2011) and CitationMan, Zheng, and Lang (2011). For an introduction to China's health and education issues, CitationHou and Li (2011) and CitationHu and Hibel (2013) provide interesting perspectives.
7 CitationHsu (2013) provides detailed discussion of this issue.
8 In case the reader did not immediately recollect why there was a dramatic increase in observations (countries), in 1990s we saw many new countries declare independence with the fall of the USSR. For example, in the 1990s, the former Yugoslavia became five independent countries, and now it is moving toward eight separate nations. In addition, many poorer nations lacked data in the early years of the sample period, this also contributed to the larger sample size in latter years of our sample.
9 Botswana was granted self-governance by the British in 1964, and gain independence in 1966. The growth rate is comparable both in terms of duration and magnitude to the economic miracle of China of late.
10 In many cases poor political governance is linked with national culture, and public corruption seems to have the most impact on human development (CitationSims, Gong, & Ruppel, 2012; CitationWu & Zhu, 2011).
