Feature Selection and Modelling of Well-Being Using the Human Development Index

Feature Selection and Modelling of Well-Being Using the Human Development Index

1 Introduction

In recent times, the dramatic rise in the global population has put strain on the resources available in countries around the world. This growing strain is being tackled by governments in the developed world by pouring resources into health, education, income and infrastructure. These vital facets of quality of life are used to define a nation’s human development, having a high value is what we mean by a developed country. There is a consensus on the idea of a developed, developing and under developed country. Such terms are used to define government spending on international aid and are used in economic forecasting for global growth and trade. But what is human development? Human development can be defined as the process of increasing the population freedoms, opportunities and well-being. Human development is about giving people the opportunities to define their own life in all aspects such as, social group, political affiliation and religious practices.

The human development concept was first proposed by Mahbub ul Haq during his time at the World Bank in the 1970s, where he argued that the measures currently in use did not account for the true purpose of human development – to improve people’s lives. This bought about a change in the way that human development was recorded, where in the past the traditional approach would be to look solely at the economy usual using Gross Domestic Product (GDP), stock prices, consumer spending and national trade and debt, giving only a partial view of how the actual population are doing. The new approach using the Human Development Index (HDI) is asking a fundamentally different question, how are people doing? The HDI is reported as a composite index between 0-1 and is used across the world as a measure of a populations well-being.  HDI looks at health, education and income, these three variables are the basic requirements of opportunity and well-being. People put most emphasis on health, by this I mean avoiding premature death due to infection, disease or injury and maintaining a healthy lifestyle and receive adequate and timely medical care. Education is important as access to knowledge is crucial in the life chances of people within a society. Income allows people to maintain their basic needs of maintaining a home and providing food and clothing, this contributes to development as standard of living.

This information is collected by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). There are many users, such as economists, development specialists, health care professionals and governments, which have a plethora of analytical questions they hope to gain understanding about by using the data sets collected. For example, the reports of the past 25 years of the human development reports have studied such questions as financing human development, security, economic growth, consumption, deepening democracy, cultural liberty, sustainability, equity and human mobility. Using these broad subject headings, they then proceed with an in-depth analysis tackling a large range of questions. The most recent report ‘Work for Human Development’ [1] considers the work place and how work can contribute to the well-being and richness of a person’s life and in some cases, lead to a worst life and reduce overall human development (such as reduced life expectancy working with dangerous chemicals). The paper then proceeds to review work looking not just at jobs in the economy, but voluntary and caring work, then looking at different work in the stages of the lifecycle and how work enhances human development, deeper work then proceeds looking at globalization of the workforce and how the workforce has modernized in the post-industrial age. Moving on the paper looks at the imbalances in paid and unpaid work concluding that both paid and unpaid work has social value. Further issues such as sustainable work and enhancing human development through work and strategies are then tackled and discussed leading to actionable recommendations such as youth employment strategies and reducing gender inequality. This shows the broad range of analytical questions that are being asked of this data set and how in-depth analysis is used to provide context to the current world position considering the given topic and giving guidance and recommendations for the world’s people and governments.

The current index is based on the combination of just four factors, life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling and gross national income (GNI) per capita. These four factors are combined to form the index value from 0-1 with 4 different categories given to different values. These combine the countries into 4 groupings (See Fig1).

Fig1 Human Development Index grouping boundaries

2. Questions

It is well known that the northern hemisphere has the largest proportion of very high human development and that the southern hemisphere has the largest proportion of low human development. The challenge since the mid-1900s has been to accelerate the growth of human development in the southern hemisphere by various economic, social and governmental changes (such as the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations), in the attempt to increase world trade and provide stability and social cohesion. This globalization of trade and commerce has been further accelerated by the internet allowing relatively cheap communication and commerce platforms to become wide spread among all countries and groups. However still there appears to be little change in the HDI for the low human development countries over the past 20 years, which prompts the questions, why? what is holding back the development? and how can this be accelerated? As there are many facets to human development, to begin investigation of these questions information about many parts of a country’s economy such as GDP, GNI and natural resources, information about the societies health such as life expectancy, education and deaths from diseases and information about the infrastructure available in the country such as electricity and internet availability are required.

To investigate these intriguing questions this paper will limit the domain to looking at the differences between the 4 groups of development countries with the view to investigating the following analytical questions:

1)     What are the most important attributes for the countries development?

2)     What are the trends in the HDI for each group over the past 35 years?

3)     Is HDI a suitable measure for well-being?

4)     Can the development of undeveloped countries can be accelerated by focusing on the most important attributes?

For more please click the link for the full paper - Link