What is prosocial development?

What's an easy to understand, less academic explanation for the difference between the UN Human Development Index (HDI) and the UN Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI)?

  • From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index In the 2010 Human Development Report a further https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_HDI (IHDI) was introduced. While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for inequality)" and "the HDI can be viewed as an index of "potential" human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality)".https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#cite_note-3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#cite_note-3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#cite_note-3 Maybe the official explanation from the UN site is not clear enough for me: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/inequality-adjusted-human-development-index-ihdi

  • Answer:

    The IHDI takes into account not only the average achievements of a country on health, education and income, but also how those achievements are distributed among its population by “discounting” each dimension’s average value according to its level of inequality. The IHDI is distribution-sensitive average level of HD. Two countries with different distributions of achievements can have the same average HDI value. Under perfect equality the IHDI is equal to the HDI, but falls below the HDI when inequality rises. The difference between the IHDI and HDI is the human development cost of inequality, also termed – the loss to human development due to inequality. The IHDI allows a direct link to inequalities in dimensions, it can inform policies towards inequality reduction, and leads to better understanding of inequalities across population and their contribution to the overall human development cost. The average global loss in HDI due to inequality is about 22.9 %—ranging from 5.5% (Finland) to 44.0% (Angola). People in sub-Saharan Africa suffer the largest losses due to inequality in all three dimensions, followed by South Asia and the Arab States and Latin America and the Caribbean. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers the highest inequality in health (36.6%), while South Asia has the highest inequality in education (41.6%). The region of Arab States also has the highest inequality in education (38%), Latin America and the Caribbean suffers the largest inequality in income (36.3%). Source: UNDP website http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/inequality-adjusted-human-development-index-ihdi

Ojas Mehta at Quora Visit the source

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I'm just guessing, but I think the IHDI uses median numbers for its calculations, while the HDI uses averages for its calculations which are more easily distorted by inequality.

Aaron Lo

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