Computation of Human Development Indices for the UNDP Nigeria Human Development Report (2016)

Nigeria Human Development Report (2016)

Human development indicators, generally, provide the basis for quantitative assessment of the achievement of countries in all areas of human endeavour. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of human progress. It considers the average achievements in three basic dimensions of human development; a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living. The indicators considered in this document are composites of socio-economic factors appropriate for assessing human development achievements in each State of the Federation. Until 2010, HDI was defined as a simple arithmetic average of normalized indices in the dimensions of health, education and income. At the moment, life expectancy (le) remains the only indicator for the health dimension while the indicators for income and education were appropriately replaced.
The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) adjusts the Human Development Index (HDI) for inequality in distribution of each dimension across the population. It is based on a distribution-sensitive class of composite indices proposed by Foster, Lopez-Calva, and Szekely (2005), which draws on the Atkinson (1970) family of inequality measures. It is computed as a geometric mean of geometric means, calculated across the population for each dimension separately (Alkire and Foster, 2010). The IHDI accounts for inequalities in HDI dimensions by “discounting” each dimensions average value according to its level of inequality. The IHDI equals the HDI when there is no inequality across people but is less than the HDI as inequality rises. In this sense, the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for this inequality), while the HDI can be viewed as an index of “potential” human development (or the maximum level of HDI) that could be achieved if there was no inequality. The “loss” in potential human development due to inequality is given by the difference between the HDI and the IHDI and can be expressed as a percentage.

Data source: National Bureau of Statistics

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