Question

List and briefly explain two strengths and one weakness of the Human Development Index as a comparative measure of human welfare? If you were designing the HDI, what might you do differently, and why?

Answer 1

Economic growth may not be sustainable if it results in adverse environmental effects by promoting levels of inequality that have a damaging impact on society. Other measures have been created that take a wider variety of variables into consideration in order to evaluate more accurately the rates of growth within a country and region.

Unlike purely financial measures, social development measures reveal data on overall living standards in individual countries

Strengths of the Human Development Index

HDI is widely used to compare rates of growth, and it reveals clear worldwide trends.
Does not focus exclusively on economic development and takes into account that there are other methods of measuring human development that are more social.
Increasing education and health in a country's infrastructure demonstrates an improvement.

Weakness of the Human Development Index

Data may not be very reliable from some developing countries and may be hard to verify. Some may find the measures selected very arbitrary because there is another way to measure comparative health and education characteristics.

The fresh Human Development Index should involve a number of modifications to the current one, although it maintains the fundamental index structure (i.e., maintaining "health," "education" and "material well-being" as the three fundamental dimensions of human development). The first shift relates to replacing the arithmetic mean with the geometric mean as a manner to more sensitively aggregate the distinct sizes. The second contributes to the implementation in the assessment of material well-being of distributive factors.