Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments August 22, 2005 erstellt
Description:
The concept of human development has been extremely successful in providing a new horizon to development economists, which extends beyond economic opulence. Acknowledgement of the fact that the concept of human development is elusive and more important than its measure (the HDI), has in no way stymied the attempts to modify HDI to make it more 'human centred'. This paper is one such attempt, which particularly deals with the issue of subjectivity involved in the methodology of the HDI. In the process it suggests a new methodology that addresses the subjectivity issue and thereby restricts the loss of information (in the form of ironing out the disparities in achievement levels) generated by the same. The method followed is a variant of the well-known Principal Component Analysis (PCA), using which the paper recalculates the HDI for 175 nations. The weights obtained by this method correspond to the coefficient of variation (CV) of the indicators, which ensures the incorporation of the disparity in achievement levels, in the final index