Inequality in Human Development across the Globe

Iñaki Permanyer,Jeroen Smits

doi:10.1111/padr.12343

Abstract

AbstractThe Human Development Index is the world's most famous indicator of the level of development of societies. A disadvantage of this index is however that only national values are available, whereas within many countries huge subnational variation in development exists. We therefore have developed the Subnational Human Development Index (SHDI), which shows within‐country variation in human development across the globe. Covering more than 1,600 regions within 161 countries, the SHDI and its underlying dimension indices provide a 10 times higher resolution picture of human development than previously available. The newly observed within‐country variation is particularly strong in low‐ and middle‐developed countries. Education disparities explain most SHDI inequality within low‐developed countries, and standard of living differences are most important within the more highly developed ones. Strong convergence forces operating both across and within countries have compensated the inequality enhancing force of population growth. These changes will shape the twenty‐first century agenda of scientists and policy‐makers concerned with global distributive justice.

Highlights

Since 1990, the United Nations Development Program has reported on a yearly basis the values of its flagship indicator: the Human Development Index [1]
The finely grained scale of the Subnational Human Development Index (SHDI) allows identifying clusters of high, middle and low human development that cut across national borders
The findings reported in this paper suggest that this distribution is characterized by (i) global inequality declines in the SHDI and its three subcomponents, (ii) large contributions of within-country inequality to overall inequality for the low and middle developed countries, and (iii) relatively small differences across subnational regions within highly developed countries

Summary

Introduction

Since 1990, the United Nations Development Program has reported on a yearly basis the values of its flagship indicator: the Human Development Index [1]. This HDI – which indicates countries’ combined achievements in education, health and standard of living – has become the key reference indicator to assess countries’ socio-economic performance, in academic as well as policy-making circles (2 – 6). We use the new Subnational Human Development Index (SHDI) Database [22], which reports sub-national values of the HDI and its three subcomponents for more than 1600 regions within 160 countries that include above 99% of the world’s population. We use the SHDI Database to report global trends in human development inequality since the year 2000 and investigate how much of that inequality can be attributable to differences occurring across or within countries

Methods

Results

Conclusion