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This article recounts the intellectual history of the UNDP’s Human Development Index. It begins with the early history of welfare economics and follows this field through three successive revolutions in thought culminating in the theory of human development. The first section traces this history from the origins of economic “utility” theory to Sen’s human capabilities approach. The second secti...

Since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has published a series of annual Human Development Reports (HDRs) in which the human development index (HDI) is computed for each country. This index has become an important alternative to the traditional unidimensional measure of development (i.e. the gross domestic product). Although the index still fails to include any ecological co...

The most limiting weakness of the human development index (HDI) is that it looks only at average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have also used aggregate information and there exists no HDI at the household level. This paper provides a method and ill...

— One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that it does not take into account inequality within countries. We suggest a methodology which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparisons of the level in human development of the poor and non-poor within and across countries. An empirical illustration shows large ...

Background: Breast cancer is one of the most common diseases in women and causes more deaths rather than other cancers. The increasing trend of breast cancer in Iran makes clear the need of extensive breast cancer research in this area. Some studies showed that in the variety countries and even in the different areas in one country has different risk of breast cancer incidence and this is a rea...