Testing for the implicit weights of the dimensions of the Human Development Index using stochastic dominance

Abstract

In 2010, United Nations’ Development Programme changed the indicators used to obtain education and income indices in the Human Development Index (HDI). In this paper, we use the Stochastic Dominance Efficiency methodology to evaluate the implicit weights of the dimensions used in the new measurement of the HDI. We find, contrary to the earlier literature, that the implicit weight attached to the education dimension is relatively low suggesting that it is relatively harder to achieve high scores in this dimension compared to other dimensions.