Assessing The Effects of Various Socio-Economic and Health Indicators on HDI Country Categories

Abstract

The human development indicator (HDI) is based on three indicators: standard of living, life expectancy, and education level. Although being widely known and commonly used, the accuracy of the HDI has been criticized in the literature due to the inadequacy of its indicators. The present study uses 11 indicators to classify countries and compares the results by country groups against similar HDI ranked country groups. Furthermore, using multinomial logistic regression analysis, the effects of the 11 indicators on the country categories of HDI are investigated. The findings show that although the main cluster characteristics are similar to HDI categories, some differences exist in the classification of countries. Health indicators have a striking effect on low HDI countries relative to high HDI countries. FDI inflows and CO2 emissions per capita are significant indicators for low and middle HDI relative to high HDI countries. However women's involvement in parliament and work are not distinctive or effective indicators.

Keywords

• cluster analysis
• gender effect
• health indicators
• human development index
• human development indicator
• multidimensional scaling
• multinomial logistic regression