AN ODDITY IN THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX
Contenido principal del artículo
Resumen
The Human Development Index is a summary measure of a country’s achievement in key dimensions of human progress. It is estimated using three indicators: Life expectancy at birth, average years of schooling, and national income per capita. The aggregate index is calculated using their geometric mean to decrease the level of substitutability among those three dimensions. However, the indicator of education is estimated by simply averaging the mean of years of schooling received by adults and the expected years of education for children entering school. This may distort the index by making countries with comparable levels of development to be ranked away from each other due to different schooling expectations. To ameliorate that distortion, we propose to estimate the indicator for education using 20-year windows to build a weighted geometric mean that captures countries’ factual advances in schooling two decades later.
UNA ANOMALÍA EN EL ÍNDICE DE DESARROLLO HUMANO
RESUMEN
El Índice de Desarrollo Humano es una medida que resume los logros de un país en dimensiones clave del progreso humano. Se estima utilizando tres indicadores: esperanza de vida al nacer, promedio de años de escolaridad e ingreso nacional per cápita. El índice agregado se calcula utilizando su media geométrica para disminuir el nivel de sustituibilidad entre esas tres dimensiones. Sin embargo, el indicador de educación se estima promediando la media de los años de escolaridad recibidos por los adultos y los años de educación esperados para los niños que ingresan a la escuela. Esto puede distorsionar el índice agregado al hacer que los países con niveles de desarrollo comparables se clasifiquen separados entre sí debido a las diferentes expectativas de escolaridad. Para mejorar esa distorsión, proponemos estimar el indicador de educación utilizando ventanas de 20 años para construir una media geométrica ponderada que capture para los países sus avances reales en la escolarización dos décadas después.
Detalles del artículo
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