The Human Development Index (HDI) is an indicator that has been being used by the United Nations since 1993 to measure the quality of living in member countries.
Previously, it had been used only the GDP, an indicator of macroeconomic development that represents the monetary value of goods and services produced in a year in a particular territory. It measures only a total economic value and, calculated per capita, becomes an average of a distribution of values.
The main limit of an average, like per capita GPD, can be easily understood considering the following instance: a city very rich redistributes its wealth in many poor ones, thus distorting the evaluation of living standards of each single city.
There was then an attempt, through the Human Development Index, to take account of different factors, in addition to per capita GDP, which could not be detained in a massive scale by a single individual, such as education level and life expectancy.
The HDI indicator is the arithmetic average of three indices: the index of life expectancy, the education level index and the GDP per capita index.
The scale of the indicator is decreasing from 1 to 0 and is divided into countries with high human development (index between 1 and 0.800), countries with medium development (index between 0.799 and 0.500), countries with low development (index between 0.499 and 0).
The latest HDI was released on December 2008.
Below, the top 10 ranked countries:
1. Iceland 0.968
2. Norway 0.968
3. Canada 0.967
4. Australia 0.965
5. Ireland 0.960
6. Netherlands 0.958
7. Sweden 0.958
8. Japan 0.956
9. Luxembourg 0.956
10. Switzerland 0.955
Sweden is, as you can see, among the first ten countries in the world.
Just a confirm or, perhaps, a surprise?