A Newer Human Development Index

The Human Development Index has experienced substantial modifications in the 2010 edition of the Human Development Report (changes in some of the variables, a different aggregation procedure, and the introduction of distributive considerations, among others). Those changes respond to some well-known shortcomings of the traditional design of this index and entail substantial improvements. There are still some inconsistencies in the new construction that have to be addressed (in particular, the use of a composite variable to approach educational achievements, the use of logs for the income variable and the type of normalization adopted). We discuss in this paper those inconsistencies and suggest some relatively minor changes that would suffice to avoid them.