Human Development

On Some Problems of Using the Human Development Index in Economic History

“…3, Prados de la Escosura (2015a), (d) eq. 4, Amendola et al (2017). The results in Figure 4 suggests an analogy with game theory's 'folk theorem'.…”

“…Concerned by the arbitrariness of both convex and concave transformations, Amendola et al (2017) proposed a new version of the HDI that aggregates the three components using a geometric mean, but normalizes all of them symmetrically with the linear transformation , as in Crafts (1997b):…”

“…In Figure 1, adopting the new evidence on literacy, longevity and per capita GDP (Vecchi 2017), we calculate four alternative HDIs for Italy: the 'old' HDI adopted by Crafts (1997) (equation 1), the 'hybrid' HDI as in Felice and Vasta (2014) (equation 2), the HIHD devised by Prados de la Escosura (2015a) (Equation 3), and the new-born HDI of Amendola et al (2017) (equation 4). Even a quick glance reveals that the series differ greatly -not only in levels, but also in trends.…”

“…In this regard, the HDI is not an exception. Roughly speaking, Arrow rules out the possibility that economic historians could come up 14 More interesting, from the interpretative side, is the exercise of decomposing the HDI into contributions made by each of the three components -life expectancy, education and income, see Amendola et al (2017).…”

“…Between 1922 and 1943, Italians lived "under the axe" of the first fascist regime: indices of civil and political rights are negatively correlated with the HDI's components: income, longevity, and schooling (Amendola et al 2017). This circumstance, combined with the abundance of high-quality, long-run estimates of several socio-economic indicators (Toniolo 2013, Vecchi 2011), provides us with all the necessary ingredients to test the inter-temporal properties of composite indices.…”