Defining Development: Exercise 1
In this post, we will discuss HDI (Human Development Index), while working with real data from Latin America and the Caribbean. Before diving into HDI, we should begin with the concept of development. Development is a rather easy concept to define. Across the board, many can agree that development represents some sort of growth towards well-being. While development is easy to define, it can be a little more tricky to measure. The problem with measuring development stems from the many different ideas on how it should be measured. Scientists studied this problem and decided on a process to measure development, known as HDI.
Human Development Index, better known as HDI, uses three main components to measure a country's human development. The three components used to develop the HDI value are life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, and GNI per capita. When evaluating any of these three components alone, flaws can be found while trying to measure development. However, when you combine the components and weight them accordingly, a great representation of development is displayed.
When evaluating the two examples below, one will note that the maps are displaying HDI values throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in the years 1990 and 2019. The choropleth maps below represent values through color scheme. Lighter colors indicating lower HDI and darker colors indicating higher HDI. The values can be found by clicking on each country. Based on this information, the countries in this data set experienced only HDI growth. That is said without knowing a few of the country's values in 1990. Some of the growth was higher than others. For example, Dominican Republic experienced a high growth from 0.599 to 0.756 between 1990 and 2019. Some countries, such as Haiti, experienced growth, but it was little growth. Haiti grew from 0.414 to 0.51 between 1990 and 2019. Most countries below experienced average growth in HDI values, feel free to click around and see for yourself!
Comments
Post a Comment