Is Human Development Multidimensional?

Abstract

Stiglitz's Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (CMEPSP) argued that well-being is multidimensional and identified eight distinct dimensions. Conventional linear techniques confirm that a large number of dimensions are needed to describe development. In contrast, a new non-linear technique that we introduce from chaos theory shows that a smaller number of dimensions are needed to span the development space. From the analysis, variables representing the Health, Education, Inequality and Individual Rights areas of life quality would provide a broad picture of development, whereas income per capita adds little extra information. ). These techniques are non-parametric and allow for non-linear relationships in the data. They were originally developed for the study of dynamic systems in high dimensions where the outcome paths may be cycles, or strange attractors, that may appear random at first sight but have a structure that means they occupy only a low dimensional subspace. We consider a set of 23 development indicators. We find these have dimension five. Our method identifies the dimension of the development space but does not provide a coordinate system. We investigate which variables span the five dimensions of the larger development space. We find that variables representing Health, Education, Inequality and Individual Rights are consistently represented in those subsets with the highest dimension and so should be included in any summary picture of development.Our results suggest that that the process of development is not arbitrary; there are 'laws' that seem to limit possible outcomes. For example, Preston (1975) argues that at each point in time, there is a (non-linear) relationship between a country's level of income per capita and its life expectancy, a relationship that continues to hold (Bloom and Canning, 2007). Kuznets (1955) suggested an inverted-U relationship between income and inequality with the distribution of income initially worsening with economic growth and improving only at 446 D. French et al. (2) and (4) are formed by dividing the number of appearances in column (1) and (3) by the number of indicators used for each area of life quality (e.g. 4 for health: life expectancy at birth, daily calorie intake, daily protein intake (grammes), mortality-infant). Note: Columns

A Poset-Generalizability Method for Human Development Indicators

“…Human development is multidimensional; however quite often it is represented by composite indicators (CIs) that lump together incommensurable features of countries or individuals into a single representation of their development (Nussbaum, 1990;Sen, 2009;French et al, 2013). As much as the communication benefits of CIs are self-evident, elaborating these indicators entails a range of pragmatic choices that have been criticised for being extremely subjective, arbitrary, potentially misleading and prone to obscure essential information (Barclay et al, 2019;Cherchye et al, 2007;Fattore, 2016;Freudenberg, 2003;Saltelli, 2007).…”