The

United Nations Development Programme The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development. The UNDP emphasizes on developing local capacity towar ...

(UNDP) compiles the

Human Development Index The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, Education Index, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income i ...

(HDI) of 193 nations in the annual Human Development Report. The index considers the

health Health has a variety of definitions, which have been used for different purposes over time. In general, it refers to physical and emotional well-being, especially that associated with normal functioning of the human body, absent of disease, p ...

education Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...

income Income is the consumption and saving opportunity gained by an entity within a specified timeframe, which is generally expressed in monetary terms. Income is difficult to define conceptually and the definition may be different across fields. F ...

and living conditions in a given country to provide a measure of human development which is comparable between countries and over time.UNDP Human Development Report 2025
/ref> The HDI is the most widely used indicator of human development and has changed how people view the concept. However, several aspects of the index have received criticism. Some scholars have criticized how the factors are weighed, in particular how an additional year of life expectancy is valued differently between countries; and the limited factors it considers, noting the omission of factors such as the levels of distributional and gender inequality. In response to the former, the UNDP introduced the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) in its 2010 report, and in response to the latter the Gender Development Index (GDI) was introduced in the 1995 report. Others have criticized the perceived oversimplification of using a single number per country. To reflect developmental differences within countries, a subnational HDI (SHDI) featuring data for more than 1,600 regions was introduced in 2018 by the Global Data Lab at Radboud University in the Netherlands. In 2020, the UNDP introduced another index, the planetary pressures–adjusted Human Development Index (PHDI), which decreases the scores of countries with a higher ecological footprint.

Dimensions and indicators

The HDI was first published in 1990 with the goal of being a more comprehensive measure of human development than purely economic measures such as

gross domestic product Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the total market value of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country or countries. GDP is often used to measure the economic performanc ...

. The index incorporates three dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and decent living standards. Various indicators are used to quantify how countries perform on each dimension. The indicators used in the 2022 report were life expectancy at birth; expected years of schooling for children; mean years of schooling for adults; and gross national income per capita. The indicators are used to create a health index, an education index and an income index, each with a value between 0 and 1. The

geometric mean In mathematics, the geometric mean is a mean or average which indicates a central tendency of a finite collection of positive real numbers by using the product of their values (as opposed to the arithmetic mean which uses their sum). The geometri ...

of the three indices—that is, the cube root of the product of the indices—is the human development index. A value above 0.800 is classified as very high, between 0.700 and 0.799 as high, 0.550 to 0.699 as medium, and below 0.550 as low. The data used to calculate HDI comes mostly from United Nations agencies and international institutions, such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and Grant (money), grants to the governments of Least developed countries, low- and Developing country, middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development ...

International Monetary Fund The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution funded by 191 member countries, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is regarded as the global lender of las ...

and

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; , OCDE) is an international organization, intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and international trade, wor ...

(OECD). Rarely, when one of the indicators is missing, cross-country regression models are used. Due to improved data and methodology updates, HDI values are not comparable across human development reports; instead, each report recalculates the HDI for some previous years. Average annual HDI growth from 2010 to 2023 published in 2025

Average annual HDI growth from 2010 to 2023 published in 2025

List

The Human Development Report includes data for all 193

member states of the United Nations The United Nations comprise sovereign states and the world's largest intergovernmental organization. All members have equal representation in the UN General Assembly. The Charter of the United Nations defines the rules for admission of ...

, as well as Hong Kong SAR and the State of Palestine. However, the

is not calculated for two UN member states:

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders China and Russia to the north at the Yalu River, Yalu (Amnok) an ...

and Monaco, only some components of the index are calculated for these two countries. The Cook Islands, the

Holy See The Holy See (, ; ), also called the See of Rome, the Petrine See or the Apostolic See, is the central governing body of the Catholic Church and Vatican City. It encompasses the office of the pope as the Bishops in the Catholic Church, bishop ...

(

Vatican City Vatican City, officially the Vatican City State (; ), is a Landlocked country, landlocked sovereign state and city-state; it is enclaved within Rome, the capital city of Italy and Bishop of Rome, seat of the Catholic Church. It became inde ...

), and Niue are the only three state parties within the United Nations System which are not included in the report. In total, the HDI is available for 192 countries and one territory. Countries ranked from 1 to 74 in 2023 are designated "very high" HDI; those ranked from 75 to 124 are designated "high" HDI; those ranked from 125 to 167 are denoted "medium" HDI; and those ranked from 168 to 193 are designated "low" HDI. Data is for the year 2023.

Regions and groups

The Human Development Report also reports the HDI for various groups of countries. These include regional groupings based on the UNDP regional classifications, HDI groups including the countries currently falling into a given HDI bracket, OECD members and various other UN groupings. The aggregate HDI values are calculated in the same way as for individual countries with the input data being the weighted average for all countries with available data in the group.

Notes

References

External links