DATA AND PERSPECTIVES

A Simple Measure of Human

Development: The Human
Life Indicator

SIMONE GHISLANDI
WARREN C. SANDERSON
SERGEI SCHERBOV

FOR MUCH OF the twentieth century, statistical measurements of human de-

velopment emphasized economic magnitudes. In 1990, the United Nations
offered an alternative and more comprehensive way of measuring human
development, the Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP 1990). The mo-
tivation behind the production of the HDI was that economic magnitudes
alone provided too narrow a basis for assessing human development. The
HDI represents a compromise between comprehensiveness and measurabil-
ity. In the HDI, the level of human development is conceptualized as having
three components: health, education, and economic conditions. These are
quantified at the country level using four indicators: life expectancy at birth,
mean and expected years of schooling, and the logarithm of Gross National
Income per capita (PPP$).1 The mean and expected years of schooling are
combined into a single education index and it is this aggregate that enters
the computation of the HDI. These indicators are then rescaled by using
“goalposts” (i.e., the rescaled value is calculated as the observed value of
each indicator minus the lower goalpost, all divided by the difference be-
tween the upper and lower goalposts). The goalposts often change with the
HDI version. Although the details of how the HDI is computed have changed
from time to time (see Appendix Table A1 for details), the UN has been pub-
lishing the “Human Development Reports” regularly since 1990, providing
the values of the HDIs for approximately 180 countries around the world
and ranking them accordingly (UNDP 1990, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014,
2016b).

Selected problems with the HDI

The 1990 Human Development Report was indeed a seminal publication
and numerous articles on measuring human development have since been

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C 2018 The Authors. Population and Development Review published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
2 THE HUMAN LIFE INDICATOR

published. Despite its success, the methodology of the HDI has been widely
criticized (see, for example, Kelley 1991; McGillivray 1991; Dasgupta and
Weale 1992; Castles 1998; Sagar and Najam 1998; Booysen 2002; Lutz and
Goujon 2004; Kovacevic 2011; Wolff, Chong, and Auffhammer 2011). This
is not surprising since its construction involves a series of assumptions re-
garding weighting, functional forms, and the selection of the policy compo-
nents. In some cases, criticisms and debates have helped improve the index.
Nevertheless, some limitations of the HDI remain. We focus on four of them
here: (1) measurement errors in its components, with the economic com-
ponent having the greatest measurement error, (2) historical inconsistency,
(3) unjustified trade-offs across its components, and (4) the correlation of
its components.

Errors in the components

One important limitation of the HDI arises because of the high level of mea-
surement error in each one of its components (see, for example, Castles
1998). Wolff, Chong, and Auffhammer (2011) conclude that when rank-
ing countries by HDI, 34 percent of them are misclassified due to data er-
rors. Importantly, in their analysis of the economic component, GNI per
capita (PPP$) has the highest measurement error, while life expectancy is
the most precise among the three components. It is not surprising that GNI
per capita has the highest measurement error. Because of technical con-
siderations, GNI per capita must be calculated for all countries at the same
time. Because the collection of comparable prices for nearly 200 countries
is costly and the methodology of combining all those data is complex and
based on many subjective assumptions, the computation of GNI per capita
is done only periodically.
In particular, the last round of GNI per capita (PPP$) computation
was based on 2011 prices and was released in 2014. The previous round
was based on 2005 prices. Between benchmark years GNI per capita is ex-
trapolated. When the 2011 data were released it was found that the data
extrapolated from the 2005 benchmark differed significantly from what
was observed based on the 2011 benchmark. Deaton and Aten (2017) ar-
gue that some of that difference was due to methodological errors in the
2005 benchmark data. Any random variability or methodological errors in
the benchmark data then are propagated through extrapolation until the
next benchmarks are released. GNI per capita based on the 2011 method-
ology assessed incomes across the world’s countries as being considerably
more equal than when those figures were computed based on the 2005
methodology.
S I M O N E G H I S L A N D I / W A R R E N C. S A N D E R S O N / S E R G E I S C H E R B O V 3

Structural changes in the goalpost values

and the functional form of the index
During the past decade, the details of how the HDI is computed have fre-
quently changed.
These changes ultimately reflect the lack of consensus on the relative
importance of the factors influencing human development. For example,
it is not clear whether in calculating human development, the geometric
or arithmetic average of the mean and expected years of schooling should
be used. In assessing human development, there is no benefit for having a
GNI per capita above $75,000 (the actual goalpost for income in the 2016
HDI). Instead of $75,000 could that income level be $85,000, or $65,000?
This lack of consensus suggests the possibility that the methodology of
the HDI will continue to be contested and that changes will continue to
be made.
A historical series of HDIs can be produced holding the functional form
of the HDI fixed as well as the goalpost values. However, different historical
series result each time the functional form of the HDI or the goalposts are
changed. Historical series of HDI values depend on historical series of GNI
per capita, and it is not clear how well those data reflect the growth of real
GNI per capita using local currency prices. A promising approach to long-
run GNI measurement has recently been suggested by Bolt and colleagues
(2018).

Unexplained trade-offs in HDI indices

An important technical criticism relates to the implied trade-offs across the
HDI’s components, such as the amount of GNI per capita needed to com-
pensate for one year loss of life expectancy. The value of one life year gained
in terms of GNI per capita varies across countries and years (according to
the different formulas for the HDI). The magnitude of the trade-offs de-
pends crucially on the formula used to combine the different components,
but the value given to one additional year of life in terms of GNI per capita
is generally lower the poorer the country (Figure 1).
This has important policy consequences. Take for example Zimbabwe,
the country with the lowest income in 2010. Ravallion (2012) shows that
given the value of the HDI and its components, the country in 2010 would
have obtained a higher HDI by implementing a policy that increased income
by only 0.52 PPP$ per capita than one that increased life expectancy of one
entire year. This implies that if a poor country decided to use the HDI to
determine its stage of development, income would count much more than
life length. For example, using the methodology of the 2016 Human De-
velopment Report, we examine the trade-offs for four countries, two with
relatively high HDI indices (Austria and Italy) and two with relatively low
4 THE HUMAN LIFE INDICATOR

FIGURE 1 Value of one additional year of life as percent of GNI per capita
(VAY), as implied by UNDP (2005, 2010, 2014)

NOTES: Value of one additional year of life as a percent of income per capita (VAY). The value of one
additional year of life is the reduction in per capita income required to keep the HDI constant when life
expectancy at birth is increased by one year. All HDI countries. HDI formulas used in 2005, 2010, and 2014.
Horizontal axis: Log of GNI per capita. Lines show polynomial fits. For 2005, the line is horizontal since the
VAY is constant at about 0.1. Data are from UNDP (2016a).

ones (Haiti and Senegal). Changes that would keep the value of the HDI
constant include increasing life expectancy at birth in Austria by one year
and decreasing Austria’s GNI per capita by 9.3 percent. The decreases in GNI
per capita that keep HDI constant when life expectancy at birth increases by
one year are 8.6 percent for Italy, 6.3 percent for Senegal, and 6.2 percent
for Haiti.
Table 1 shows other examples of these trade-offs. The reductions in
GNI per capita that keep the HDI constant when the mean years of schooling
are increased by one year are large. In Austria, the reduction is 21.2 percent
of GNI per capita. The decrease in GNI per capita in Italy is 20.4 percent, in
Senegal 23.3 percent, and in Haiti 18.4 percent. In particular, Senegal had
mean years of schooling of 2.8. Its value of the HDI would be the same if
it increased it to 3.8 and reduced its GNI by almost one-quarter. In Austria,
a reduction in GNI per capita of 21.2 percent would be counterbalanced by
an increase in the mean years of schooling of one year, from 11.3 to 12.3.
Are all these country-specific trade-off values really meaningful?
S I M O N E G H I S L A N D I / W A R R E N C. S A N D E R S O N / S E R G E I S C H E R B O V 5

TABLE 1 Trade-offs in the HDI, four countries

Austria Italy
(HDI = 0.893) (HDI = 0.887)
HDI Components LE MYS EYS GNI/POP LE MYS EYS GNI/POP
81.6 11.3 15.9 43,609 83.3 10.9 16.3 33,573
Trade-offs (HDI constant)
Trade-off 1 + 1 yr –21.2% + 1 yr –20.4%
Trade-off 2 –2.4 yr + 1 yr –2.5 yr + 1 yr
Trade-off 3 +1 yr –18.1% +1 yr –17.4%
Trade-off 4 –2.0 yr +1yr –2.1 yr +1yr

Senegal Haiti
(HDI = 0.495) (HDI = 0.493)
HDI Components LE MYS EYS GNI/POP LE MYS EYS GNI/POP
66.9 2.8 9.5 2,250 63.1 5.2 9.1 1,657
Trade-offs (HDI constant)
Trade-off 1 + 1 yr –23.3% + 1 yr –18.4%
Trade-off 2 –4 yr + 1 yr –3.1 yr + 1 yr
Trade-off 3 +1 yr –20.1% +1 yr –15.8%
Trade-off 4 –3.4 yr +1yr –2.6 yr +1yr
SOURCE: UNDP 2016b and authors’ calculations.
NOTES: HDI components and changes in them that keep HDI constant. HDI = Human Development Index.
LE = Life Expectancy. MYS = Mean Years of Schooling; EYS = Expected Years of Schooling; GNI/POP = Per
Capita GNI.

The redundancy of the underlying indices

A further relevant concern is related to the redundancy of HDI components.
Life expectancy, GNI, and education are strongly correlated with one other,
both empirically and conceptually (McGillivray 1991; Ogwang 1994; Sen
1998; Ogwang and Abdou 2003). This is not surprising. People who are
more educated tend to be richer and, on average, experience longer life
spans. This is known as the “socioeconomic gradient” and represents a very
pervasive phenomenon in virtually all societies around the world (Marmot
2005). In itself, redundancy does not pose a problem for the reliability of the
index. However, it does question the efficiency of the HDI, suggesting that
the composite index might not reveal more than its single components. Sim-
ilar results could then be achieved through a less information-demanding
approach.

Measuring human life and its distribution: The

Human Life Indicator
If one takes both history and measurability seriously, the best approach is
to “keep it simple,” reducing the redundancies related to a multidimen-
sional index and providing data that can be sufficiently stable as to allow
6 THE HUMAN LIFE INDICATOR

comparisons across time. This is true also for the measurement of human
development.
Life expectancy represents a good candidate for this purpose. Since it
is one of the three components included in the HDI, this strategy would
require dropping education and GNI per capita. This would be problematic
only to the extent that relevant information is lost. However, the strong
correlation among the components reduces significantly the related infor-
mation loss.
The use of the sole health component of human development instead
of a composite index helps to answer some of the more technical criticisms
of the HDI defined above, since:

(1) It does not depend on any trade-off, implying that the economic and
schooling components matter only to the extent that they can influence
life conditions and mortality. Note that this does not imply that income
and education are not important. Rather, an increase in the economic
and educational levels of a country should be considered as relevant
only when they translate into an improved life-span for individuals.
This view is consistent with the approach to development based on the
idea that we should be seeing “incomes and commodities” not as some-
thing that “people have reason to value intrinsically,” but rather as “in-
struments,” i.e., as “means to other ends,” this end being a good and
long life (Sen 1998). Sen explicitly suggests that mortality should be
considered as an indicator of economic success and failure (Sen 1998).
(2) Its measurement errors are smaller than the ones associated with ed-
ucation and income. The measurement errors for the three indicators
of the HDI as reported by Wolff, Chong, and Auffhammer (2011) show
that, although uncertainty exists for all the indicators, life expectancy
is the least error-prone among the three (see Appendix Figure B1).
(3) It is built on data that are more clearly comparable across countries
and times. Mortality data allow researchers to provide a much more
consistent picture of development patterns at country levels, both geo-
graphically and historically.

Life expectancy at birth is the arithmetic average of ages at death, and

like any other arithmetic average it is not influenced by the distribution
of ages of death around that average. For example, two countries with the
same life expectancy might have very different infant mortality figures, sim-
ply because in a country with low infant mortality, adults die earlier (per-
haps as a result of genetics). The measure that we propose is a modification
of life expectancy that also takes the distribution of ages at death around its
average value into account.
If people experience the age-specific survival rates in a life table,
they will die at various ages. The arithmetic mean of their lifespans is life
S I M O N E G H I S L A N D I / W A R R E N C. S A N D E R S O N / S E R G E I S C H E R B O V 7

TABLE 2 Correlations between HLI and HDI and its components

HLI HDI GNI/POP EYS MYS
HLI 1.00
HDI 0.93 1.00
GNI/POP 0.66 0.74 1.00
EYS 0.84 0.92 0.63 1.00
MYS 0.80 0.91 0.59 0.83 1.00
SOURCE: UNDP 2016b.
NOTES: Correlations between the Human Life Indicator (HLI), the Human Development Index (HDI), Gross
National Income per capita (GNI/POP), Expected Years of Schooling (EYS), and Mean Years of Schooling (MYS).
Based on all countries in the 2014 Human Development Report.

expectancy at birth. Our measure, called the Human Life Indicator (HLI), is
the geometric average of those lifetimes:


N
HLI = (agei + ai )di
i=1

where agei is the age at the lower end of the age interval i in a life ta-
ble, ai is the average number of years lived in the interval by those who
die in the interval, di is the fraction of deaths in age interval i among all
deaths, and N is the number of age intervals in the life table.
The use of the geometric mean penalizes countries that have a rel-
atively high variation in the length of lives. In particular, if two coun-
tries had the same life expectancy at birth, the country with the lower
infant and child mortality rates would generally have the higher HLI. In-
fant and child mortality rates are highly correlated with education across
countries and time periods, so using the HLI reduces the information lost
by not explicitly including education. More generally, the HLI explicitly
treats the reduction in the inequality in lifetimes as an additional con-
tributor to the improvement in human development. If everyone in the
population lived the same number of years (implying, in particular, a
zero child mortality rate), the HLI and the life expectancy at birth would
coincide.
Table 2 shows the correlations among the HLI, the HDI, gross national
income per capita (GNI per capita), expected years of schooling (EYS), and
mean years of schooling (MYS). Although the HLI is much simpler than the
HDI, the correlation between the two is 0.93. The observation that the HLI,
which is based on a single indicator, is so closely correlated with the HDI
reflects the extent of redundancy in the HDI indicators. Table 2 also shows
that the HLI is closely correlated to the two schooling variables. The effects
of education are reflected in the HLI, even though the schooling variables
are not explicitly included in it.
 8 THE HUMAN LIFE INDICATOR

FIGURE 2 The HLI around the world

SOURCE: UN 2017.
NOTE: HLI = Human Life Indicator.

The geography and history of the HLI across

countries
Figure 2 shows the distribution of the HLI across countries based on 2010–
15 UN life tables. In general, countries broadly maintain their development
rankings when the measure switches from HDI to HLI (Figure 3). Never-
theless, the correlation between HLI and HDI is not perfect and for some
countries the changes in the relative position can be substantial. This mainly
happens for the (relatively) richer countries, where the high level of income
represents the main driver of the good HDI performance. Consider for ex-
ample Norway, which has been on the top of the HDI ranking for the last
two decades. Its high GNI per capita is based, in part, on its extensive North
Sea oil and gas deposits. When using the HLI, Norway slips to the ninth po-
sition, mainly because its very high levels of GNI per capita have not been
translated into correspondingly longer life spans.
One crucial advantage of the HLI is its capacity to provide a measure
of human development that can go farther back than 1990. Looking at
the series of HLI by countries (Figure 4), the impact of relevant historical
events, such as, for example, the World Wars for European countries, are ev-
ident. The HLI is thus particularly responsive to major macro-level shocks,
a characteristic that is of primary importance for the longitudinal dimen-
sion of an index. Regarding the patterns of development, the series show
that, with the exception of the Northern European countries, the period
between the end of World War II and the 1980s produced the most impres-
sive worldwide increase in human development ever witnessed in human
S I M O N E G H I S L A N D I / W A R R E N C. S A N D E R S O N / S E R G E I S C H E R B O V 9

FIGURE 3 Changes in country rankings from a ranking based on the HDI to a

ranking based on the HLI

SOURCES: UNDP 2016b and authors’ calculations.

NOTES: Positive numbers imply improvement in rankings. HDI = Human Development Index. HLI = Human
Life Indicator.

FIGURE 4 HLI for selected countries

SOURCE: UC Berkeley, and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research 2017.
NOTE: HLI = Human Life Indicator.
10 THE HUMAN LIFE INDICATOR

history. This growth slowed down earlier (during the 1960s) only for Russia,
which has experienced a stall in the growth of the HLI ever since. Steady
growth patterns in the HLI are noticeable in other countries around the
world. For example, the HLIs in Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador have all been
constantly growing since the 1950s (see Appendix Figures B2 and B3). In
Asia, the HLI reflects the impact of some dramatic historic events, such as
the Vietnam War and the Pol-Pot dictatorship in Cambodia.

HLI in Indian states

HLIs can be calculated whenever life tables are available, including places
where suitable data on education and economic output per capita are not
available. The study of comparative human development in urban and ru-
ral areas is one example of this. Even if life expectancy at birth, the mean
years of schooling, the expected years of schooling, and some measure of
economic output per capita were available in each area, producing urban
and rural HDIs would still be problematic. An area may have relatively high
measured output because of mineral production, for example, but the peo-
ple in the area could be quite poor because they receive little benefit from
that production. Regional economic magnitudes that account for price dif-
ferences can be calculated in a number of ways and the differences could
have consequential effects on the HDI values.
In addition, most economic measures only count output that goes
through markets. A higher proportion of output in rural areas might be
in nonmarketed goods and services. Using flawed economic data could pro-
duce regional HDIs, which are misleading for policy purposes.
In this section, we provide an example of how HLIs can be used to
quantify regional differences in human development across space and over
time. Table 3 shows the HLIs for urban and rural areas of Indian states for
which Sample Registration System (SRS) life tables are available for 2007–
11, 2011–15, and for the country as a whole.
A full analysis of human development in India based on HLIs is be-
yond the scope of this article, so we highlight only a few observations from
the table. In Table 3, the highest HLI values are for Kerala. Besides Kerala’s
high HLI values, the urban-rural differences in HLIs are almost nonexistent.
The state that had the greatest increases in both urban and rural HLIs be-
tween 2007–11 and 2011–15 was Odisha. Although Odisha had a relatively
large urban-rural difference in HLIs in 2007–11, the rapid increases in HLIs
were somewhat faster in the urban area, increasing urban-rural inequality
in human development there. It is interesting to compare the experience
of Odisha with that of Assam. For India as a whole, the urban-rural gap
in human development, as assessed using HLIs, diminished between 2007–
11 and 2011–15. In rural India, the HLI increased by 4.08 in that period
while in urban India it increased by 3.66. In Odisha, HLI increases in both
S I M O N E G H I S L A N D I / W A R R E N C. S A N D E R S O N / S E R G E I S C H E R B O V 11

TABLE 3 HLI for Indian states in different years, urban and rural
Urban Rural
State 2011–15 2007–11 Difference 2011–15 2007–11 Difference
Andhra Pradesh 62.91 59.04 3.86 54.86 49.32 5.53
Assam 62.33 56.83 5.51 47.67 43.99 3.68
Bihar 60.42 56.47 3.95 55.22 50.49 4.73
Chhattisgarh 57.15 n.d. n.d. 50.64 n.d. n.d.
Delhi 65.83 n.d. n.d. 60.95 n.d. n.d.
Gujarat 61.30 58.52 2.78 51.36 47.85 3.51
Haryana 59.05 55.19 3.86 53.50 49.00 4.51
Himachal Pradesh 66.95 63.70 3.25 58.10 56.06 2.04
India 61.93 58.27 3.66 52.59 48.51 4.08
Jammu & Kashmir 64.30 60.74 3.55 57.43 54.43 3.01
Jharkhand 62.12 n.d. n.d. 53.31 n.d. n.d.
Karnataka 63.17 60.27 2.90 56.04 51.13 4.91
Kerala 70.37 69.88 0.49 69.35 68.61 0.74
Madhya Pradesh 57.21 53.49 3.72 45.63 41.28 4.35
Maharashtra 67.66 63.83 3.83 61.28 57.66 3.62
Odisha 60.52 54.11 6.41 50.32 44.18 6.14
Punjab 65.53 60.77 4.77 59.62 54.61 5.01
Rajasthan 58.39 55.57 2.82 50.05 45.79 4.25
Tamil Nadu 65.33 61.95 3.38 60.84 57.51 3.33
Uttar Pradesh 53.15 49.66 3.48 46.04 42.88 3.16
Uttarakhand 63.57 n.d. n.d. 59.70 n.d. n.d.
West Bengal 64.59 61.68 2.91 58.81 56.56 2.26
SOURCE: Government of India 2018 and authors’ computations.
NOTES: Human Life Indicator (HLI) in urban areas of states for which Sample Registration System (SRS) life
tables are available, 2007–11 and 2011–15. “n.d.” indicates that no data were available to make the calculation
of HLI. States are listed in order of their HLIs in 2011–15. Figures are rounded independently.

the urban and rural areas were faster than those in India as a whole. In
Assam, on the other hand, the urban HLI grew faster than the all-India ur-
ban HLI, while the rural HLI grew more slowly than the all-India rural HLI.
Observations such as these can potentially be useful in assessing the sus-
tainable development goal of reducing regional inequalities.

Concluding remarks
No measure of the progress of human development is perfect. Different in-
dices provide different perspectives. The HLI is simpler than the HDI and
because of this does not presume contentious trade-offs between the com-
ponents of human development. Even though it is simpler, the correlation
between the HLI and the HDI is rather high (0.93). The HLI does not explic-
itly include an economic component. In theory, this is a disadvantage, but
in practice, it might not be. GNI per capita measured in purchasing power
parity has been subject to large revisions each time new benchmark figures
have been published. Moreover, there is a great deal of redundancy in the
12 THE HUMAN LIFE INDICATOR

HDI components, so differences in economic conditions are still reflected

in the HLI. The behavior of the HLI in time and space reflects the major
economic and political events across the world and provides a credible pic-
ture of the evolution of human development in the last century.
Reducing inequality in human development is a sustainable develop-
ment goal. The HLI can be useful in assessing progress toward that goal for
two reasons. First, the HLI takes inequality of lifespans into account. Holding
life expectancy at birth constant, areas with less inequality in lifespans have
higher HLIs. Second, the HLI can also be used to study inequality in human
development across regions of countries where it is difficult or impossible to
obtain meaningful and comparable measures of economic conditions. The
HDI and the HLI can both be used in policy analyses. One need not be an
alternative to the other.

Note
The research leading to these results has re- els so that equivalent amounts of currency
ceived funding from the European Research would be able to buy an equivalent bun-
Council under the European Union’s Sev- dle of goods. For example, if, according to
enth Framework Programme (FP7/2007- PPP calculations, 1 unit of currency in coun-
2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. ERC2012- try A was the equivalent of 5 units of cur-
AdG 323947-Re-Ageing. The underly- rency in country B, then a person with 1
ing data for this study is available at unit of currency in country A and a per-
www.iiasa.ac.at/pop/HLI. son with 5 units of currency in country B
1 Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a should be able to buy the same amount of
method of adjusting the relative price lev- goods.

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14 THE HUMAN LIFE INDICATOR

APPENDIX A
The Changing Definition of the HDI

TABLE A1 HDI and its components through the years

Income
LE index (x Education index (y = Income HDI index
= LE) index income) variable mean
2005 x−25
85−25
2 alr
3 100
+ 1 ger
3 100
GDP per Arithmetic
ln(y)−ln(100)
ln(40,000)−ln(100)
capita
2010 x−20
83.2−20
1 mys
(
2 15
+ eys
18
) GNI per Geometric
ln(y)−ln(163)
ln(108,211)−ln(163)
capita
2014 x−20
85−20
1 mys
(
2 15
+ eys
18
) GNI per Geometric
ln(y)−ln(100)
ln(75,000)−ln(100)
capita
NOTES: Formulas and parameters are taken from the Human Development Reports of the corresponding years.
alr = Adult Literacy Rate; ger = Gross Education Rate; mys = Mean Years of Schooling; eys = Expected Years of
Schooling. HDI = Human Development Index. LE = Life Expectancy.

APPENDIX B
Additional Evidence

FIGURE B1 Coefficients of variation of measurement errors of Education,

Life Expectancy, and Gross Domestic Product, over HDI

NOTES: Coefficients of variation (CV) for an index for country i: σ i/μi, where σ is the standard error of the
country-specific measurement error, and μ is the country-specific mean. Countries are ordered according to
their Human Development Index (HDI). Measurement errors are from Wolff, Chong, and Auffhammer (2011).
The graph shows that measurement errors generally decrease for countries with higher HDI, and that life
expectancy is associated with lower measurement errors, especially for high HDI countries.
 S I M O N E G H I S L A N D I / W A R R E N C. S A N D E R S O N / S E R G E I S C H E R B O V 15

FIGURE B2 HLI in history, African and Latin American countries

NOTES: Authors’ calculations based on UN 2017. HLI = Human Life Indicator.

FIGURE B3 HLI in history, Eastern European and Asian countries

NOTES: Authors’ calculations based on UN 2017. HLI = Human Life Indicator.