Human Development Status and Regional Disparity in China

Abstract

The 2010 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Global Human Development Report introduced a new methodology to calculate Human Development Index (HDI). Three dimensions of HDI i.e. income, education, and health are adjusted for inequalities in attainments across people. The paper uses the new methodology to estimate 2010 China's national and provincial HDI. Compared with UNDP global report, all the data used here are from China's domestic sources. The education indicator estimated here by referring to detailed local statistics and documents are higher than that in UNDP's global report, thus contributing a slight higher overall HDI estimate. Based on the estimation results here and UNDP's report, China is located in between high human development and low human development, in other words, placed around the half position among all 169 countries. To facilitate a cross-country comparison, the indices are normalized with reference to the goalposts outlined in the HDR 2010. When ranked according to global goalposts, Beijing's rank is 31 whereas the least developed Tibet only ranks 114. Most of the regional disparity is driven by their income differences. The findings of this paper try to shed light on the status of China's human development and also gain insights on China's regional disparity. Further research is required to explore the inter-linkages between inequalities across various dimensions and to examine the factors behind these inequalities.