Abstract
During the last decades, the central focus of economists was growth of incomes in the early 1990s, the focus shifted towards the quality of life and development strategies being oriented from production to welfare improvement. In recent years a large literature has been developed regarding indicators of welfare and life quality. The Human Development Index (HDI), elaborated by the United Nations Development Program in 1990, was an indicator of life quality and a good proxy indicator of welfare. Human Development Index provides a better alternative to measure countries overall achievements in their social and economic dimensions. In this paper, the theoretical literature review provides a brief history of the human evolution and development aspects. This paper examines the dimensions of Human Development Index like life expectancy, education and income index in Balkan countries. The aim of this paper is to found out the trend of human development in Balkan countries and to make a comparison of various human development aspects in Albania comparing it with other countries in the region. This paper is completed through qualitative methods. Finally the paper will be closed with some conclusions. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s3p311
Highlights
Whenever we think about development, usually we tend to think about economic development
HDR 2014 included Human Development Index (HDI) rankings for 187 countries which are grouped into four categories related to human development: Very High Human Development when the value of HDI is greater than 0.8, High Human Development when the value of the HDI is between 0.700-0.799, Medium Human Development when the value of HDI is between 0.550-0.699 and Low Human Development when the value of the HDI is less than 0.550
In the Balkan countries that are taken into analysis has been an improvement for HDI values referring to the period 1990-2013
Summary
Whenever we think about development, usually we tend to think about economic development. Using GNP as a measuring tool for the economic performance and social progress does not include many of the multidimensional aspects of development such as poverty, income inequalities, unemployment, and inequality in access to goods and public services such are health, education, etc (Nayak, 2013). In this way it is necessary to use indicators that give us a clear view of these aspects because GNP is not sufficient to be a sole indicator of welfare because is focused in only one aspect of welfare. The main deficiency of measuring the development only from the economic aspects is concentration on the measurement of national product and aggregate income than people's entitlement and capabilities that generate these rights (Sen, 1984; Noorbakhsh, 1998)
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