Human Development Report in the context of "Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index"

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores a higher level of HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the gross national income GNI (PPP) per capita is higher. It was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq and was further used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Human Development Report Office.

The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for this inequality), while the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development (or the maximum level of HDI) that could be achieved if there was no inequality."

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) compiles the Human Development Index (HDI) of 193 nations in the annual Human Development Report. The index considers the health, education, income and living conditions in a given country to provide a measure of human development which is comparable between countries and over time.

The HDI is the most widely used indicator of human development and has changed how people view the concept. However, several aspects of the index have received criticism. Some scholars have criticized how the factors are weighed, in particular how an additional year of life expectancy is valued differently between countries; and the limited factors it considers, noting the omission of factors such as the levels of distributional and gender inequality. In response to the former, the UNDP introduced the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) in its 2010 report, and in response to the latter the Gender Development Index (GDI) was introduced in the 1995 report. Others have criticized the perceived oversimplification of using a single number per country.

This is a list of countries by inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), as published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its 2025 Human Development Report. According to the 2016 Report, "The IHDI can be interpreted as the level of human development when inequality is accounted for", whereas the Human Development Index itself, from which the IHDI is derived, is "an index of potential human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality)".

This is a list of the first-level administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China (PRC), including all provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, and special administrative regions in order of their Human Development Index (HDI), along with the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan). The subnational and national average figures for the PRC/ROC division are mainly derived from the Subnational Human Development Index (SHDI), published by the Global Data Lab at Radboud University. The index does not cover Macau, a special administrative region of the PRC. Only divisions of Mainland China are given ranking numbers in the list as the national HDI for China, which is calculated by the annual UNDP Human Development Report, is exclusively applied to the mainland.

Human security is a paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities whose proponents challenge the traditional notion of national security through military security by arguing that the proper referent for security should be at the human rather than the national level, and that a people- centered view of security is necessary for national, regional and global stability. The concept emerged from a multi-disciplinary understanding of security which involves a number of research fields, including development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report is considered a milestone publication in the field of human security, with its argument that ensuring "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" for all persons is the best path to tackle the problem of global insecurity.

Critics of the concept argue that its vagueness undermines its effectiveness, that it has become little more than a vehicle for activists wishing to promote certain causes, and that it does not help the research community understand what security means or help decision-makers to formulate good policies. Alternatively, other scholars have argued that the concept of human security should be broadened to encompass military security: 'In other words, if this thing called 'human security' has the concept of 'the human' embedded at the heart of it, then let us address the question of the human condition directly. Thus understood, human security would no longer be the vague amorphous add-on to harder-edged areas of security such as military security or state security.'

The Gender Development Index (GDI) is an index designed to measure gender equality.

GDI, together with the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), was introduced in 1995 in the Human Development Report written by the United Nations Development Program. These measurements aimed to add a gender-sensitive dimension to the Human Development Index (HDI). The first measurement that they created was the Gender Development Index (GDI). The GDI is defined as a "distribution-sensitive measure that accounts for the human development impact of existing gender gaps in the three components of the HDI" (Klasen 243). Distribution sensitivity means that the GDI takes into account not only the average or general level of well-being and wealth within a given country but focuses also on how this wealth and well-being is distributed between different groups within society. The HDI and the GDI (as well as the GEM) were created to rival the more traditional general income-based measures of development such as gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product (GNP).