The Human Development Index (HDI) and Its Variants for the Argentine Republic in the Period 1996–2016

Abstract

Indices serve to inform the general public as well as agents with the ability to develop strategies to improve the conditions of the population. Among the most widely used indices on a global scale is the Human Development Index (HDI). According to the United Nations Development Program (PNUD 2013, p. 27), human development can be understood as the expansion of people's capacities and their real freedoms, that is, the expansion of their life alternatives. Therefore, this is a more comprehensive concept than the conventional development notion. To construct this index, three elements are taken into account (Table 1): the level of health, represented by life expectancy at birth; the level of education, represented by the literacy rate of adults and the average year of schooling, and finally the income, represented by the Gross Domestic Product per inhabitant. The HDI is an unweighted, normalized measure that classifies countries or regions on a scale that goes from 0 to 1 and allows considering three levels of human development: high (more than 0.800), medium (between 0.500 and 0.799) and low (less than 0.500). Its main virtue lies in the simplicity of its preparation, it is easy to understand and facilitate a comparison between countries and regions. All countries survey the components of the HDI, so that similarities and differences can be examined to determine the situation of the inhabitants at the regional level. However, modifications of the index have emerged to adapt it to more recent demands such as the issue of gender, inequality or sustainability. This is how the Provincial Sustainable Development Index, the Expanded Human Development Index and the Gender Inequality Index have emerged. The results show a constant improvement of the indexes for Argentina in the 1995–2016 period, although the spatial configuration of the data remains the same, given that the provinces with the lowest values ​​and those with the highest records are frequently the same. However, as of the 2011 report, all jurisdictions are located within the high HDI interval, exceeding 0.800 points in a context of progressive reduction of the gap between the extremes of the index scores. This improvement is also recorded for the EHDI and the GII (the latter also presents all jurisdictions above the value of 0.800 in 2016). A particular case is the Provincial Sustainable Development Index, which was released with data for the year 2016, since it shows greater territorial differentiation and with a very wide range between extreme values. In addition, it includes the environmental component, a fundamental feature in any survey about the living conditions of the population in modern times. If we analyze the HDI through its components, a greater spatial variability is observed depending on the dimension analyzed. While life expectancy shows a significant improvement in all provinces, income has fluctuated according to the economic context of the country. For its part, the educational component also shows, in most cases, an improvement throughout the 1996–2016 period.