An index for sustainable development

Abstract

As a possible improvement to the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI), we propose including in the set of individual variables some of an environmental or social nature. Thus, by rescaling all the variables non-linearly it is possible to mitigate the effect of outliers and synthesize by principal components, or alternatively by a different averaging method that takes sustainability into account and penalizes unbalances among different aspects of development. Both methods are easy to implement and calibrate. The ensuing effect on the ranking of world countries is compared to the HDI ranking.

Keywords

• Development
• Sustainability