A human development index at the household level

Abstract

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have also used aggregate information and there exists no HDI at the household level. We provide a method for proxying the HDI at the household level. This allows the analysis of the HDI by any kind of population subgroups and by household socioeconomic characteristics as well as to apply any kind of inequality measure across population subgroups and over time. We illustrate our approach for 15 developing countries. Inequality in the HDI is stunningly large for some countries, driven mostly by very high inequality in the education and income components of the HDI. The inequality in human development is larger than previously reported which is largely due to the new procedures for calculating the HDI used in the 2010 Human Development Report. Inequality in the HDI is largest in poorer countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.