Speaker

Srijit Mishra, Associate Professor, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai

Event date

बुध, 10 जुलाई

Venue

NIPFP Seminar Room

Abstract

The HDI is calculated using normalized indicators from three domains - education, health and standard of living (or income). The paper evaluates the various measures through a set of axioms with the acronym MANUSH representing Monotonicity, Anonymity, Normalization, Uniformity (balanced growth across domains should be rewarded), Signalling and Hiatus sensitivity (indicating that inequality across domains or the same gap across domain's should be considered worse off as the attainment increases). The old measure of taking a linear average of the three domains satisfies the first three axioms (or MAN) and the current geometric mean approach satisfies the first four (or MANU). We propose an alternative measure that measures the inverse of the shortfall of the distance from the ideal, which satisfies all the MANUSH axioms. Incidentally, MANUSH means human in Bengali and the term can also be rearranged to denote HUMANS.