Human Assets Index: Insights from a Retrospective Series Analysis
Résumé
We build retrospective series for the Human Assets Index from the United
Nations—Committee for Development Policy data. The HAI is a composite index which
includes health and education components. Our series cover 145 developing countries for
the period 1990–2014. The analysis provides insights into the changes in the HAI and its
distribution for different groups of Developing Countries. We discuss the importance of
the HAI’s components by considering the weight given to them in the index. We propose
a new weighting scheme which is optimized based on the correlation ratio and linearity
(nonlinearity) relationship between components, and we present the country ranking
changes due to the optimized HAI.