Temporal analysis of human development indicators: Principal component approach

In this study, we used the weighted principal component method on the human development indicators to measure and analyze the progress of human development in the world. The main principal component was employed to quantify the temporal changes of the human development of several selected countries by the proposed Z-test. The trends of the human development in the period of market transition in two large countries, China and Russia, were discussed in terms of the impact of public health as well as economic development. The association of the main principal component obtained from our study and the human development index reported by the United Nations Development Programme was estimated by the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.