Which indicators are used in Human Development Index (HDI) ?
1. Income level
2. Education
3. Condition of environment
4. Life expectancy
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Only 1, 2 and 4. The UNDP's Human Development Index is built on exactly three dimensions, and the question lists all three plus one intruder. (1) Income level — a decent standard of living, measured by Gross National Income per capita at purchasing power parity. (2) Education — knowledge, measured by two indicators together, the mean years of schooling of adults aged 25 and above and the expected years of schooling of a child of school-entering age. (4) Life expectancy — a long and healthy life, measured by life expectancy at birth. Those four indicators are combined into three dimension indices, each normalised on a 0-1 scale, and since the 2010 Human Development Report the three are aggregated by a geometric mean rather than a simple average, precisely so that a country cannot buy a good HDI score by excelling on income while failing on health. Statement (3), the condition of the environment, is the falsifier: no environmental variable enters the HDI at any stage. That is not an oversight the UNDP is unaware of — its Human Development Report 2020 answered the criticism by publishing a separate index, the Planetary pressures-adjusted HDI, which discounts a country's HDI by its per-capita carbon dioxide emissions and its per-capita material footprint. The point for the exam is that this adjustment produces a different index published alongside the HDI; it does not become part of the HDI. So the codes that survive are 1, 2 and 4, which is option (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Wrong twice over: it admits the environment, which the HDI does not measure, and it drops life expectancy, which is the HDI's oldest and least disputable component. Health was in the index from the first Human Development Report in 1990 and has never been altered — life expectancy at birth has always carried the 'long and healthy life' dimension, while the education and income indicators were both redefined in 2010. Any option that leaves life expectancy out cannot describe the HDI.  (b) Keeps two genuine components, income and life expectancy, but silently deletes education. Knowledge is a full one-third of the index, and it is the dimension that carries two of the HDI's four indicators — mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling. This option is a description of a two-dimensional welfare measure, not of the HDI.  (d) Drops life expectancy, the health dimension. It is worth seeing why this option is tempting: income and education are the two things a candidate most readily associates with 'development', and health can feel like an outcome rather than an indicator. In the HDI, however, longevity is a dimension in its own right, and the whole point of Mahbub ul Haq's design was to stop income from standing in for human well-being.

Concept: The Human Development Index was created by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, working with Amartya Sen, and was first published in the UNDP's Human Development Report of 1990. Its purpose was to displace GNP per capita as the single measure of a country's progress by insisting that people, not money, are the real wealth of nations. The architecture has stayed remarkably stable: three dimensions — a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living — with the indicators refined once, in the 2010 Report, when the education dimension moved from adult literacy plus gross enrolment to mean and expected years of schooling, the income indicator moved from GDP per capita to GNI per capita (PPP), and the arithmetic mean was replaced by a geometric mean.

State PCS 2024 Q92 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q92 — Economy PYQ with Answer