Is the Human Development Index Redundant?
) (Department of Economics, College of the Holy Cross) Abstract It is shown that the component statistics of the HDI are highly correlated with one another. The paper demonstrates that an implication of this correlation is that a wide range of index weights produce indexes that are statistically identical to the HDI. Indexes with only two of the three HDI components are very highly correlated with the HDI. These results can be interpreted two ways: either the HDI is robust to a wide range of index weights, or it is largely redundant. Download InfoTo download: If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Information about this may be contained in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
