Answer:
Human Development Index (HDI) is the strongest and widely used measure of overall performance of countries. The '2014 Human Development Report - Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience' provides a fresh perspective on vulnerability and proposes ways to strengthen resilience. It highlights the need for both promoting people’s choices and protecting human development achievements. It takes the view that vulnerability threatens human development and, unless it is systematically addressed, progress will be neither equitable nor sustainable. Based on the light of this recent report launched on 24 July, 2014, here in this study, an attempt has been made to global highlights of the report, comparison of SAARC countries and remarks on the status of Nepal.
Key Words: Human development index, SAARC, rank, value, highlights. 1. BACKGROUND
Human Development Index (HDI) is the comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy and income for living standard and overall performance of countries worldwide. The 2014 HDI report covers 187 countries, the same number as in 2013 and 2012. The HDI emphasizes that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone. The HDI can also be used to make national policy choices, asking how two countries with the same level of GNI per capita can end up with different human development outcomes.
There have been significant revisions of the methodology for computation of the HDI. The modifications in methodology include the change in maxima for normalization of dimensional indices – previously they were equal to the observed maxima over the period since 1980, now they are fixed at 85 for life expectancy (LE), 15 years for mean years of schooling (MYS), 18 years for expected years of schooling (EYS), and $75,000 for GNI per capita (GNI pc). The previously used approach of ‘observed maxima’ was criticized mainly on the grounds that the HDI of the country should depend only on the country's own achievements, however when using the observed maxima the HDI also depended on other countries, on those whose values were used as maxima. The other change is in the way the education indicators are aggregated. Previously used geometric aggregation was criticized on the grounds that a typical developing country has a (much) higher