IS THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX REDUNDANT

Abstract

It is shown that the component statistics of the HDI are highly correlated with one another. An implication of this correlation is that a wide range of index weights produce indexes that are statistically identical to the HDI. Indexes with only two of the three HDI components are very highly correlated with the HDI. The results can be considered two ways: either the HDI is largely redundant, or the HDI results are robust to a wide range of index weights.