Human Development Index

Human Development Index

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, a good education, and a decent standard of living. Higher values indicate higher human development.
Data source: UNDP
Last updated: 2025-05-07
Next expected update: 2026-07-12
Managed by: Pablo Rosado

The Human Development Index (HDI) provides a broad, intuitive measure for comparing overall human progress across countries and over time. A higher HDI implies longer, healthier lives, better education and higher command over resources; however, it does not capture inequality, sustainability or subjective wellbeing
It is a composite summary of a country's average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development – health (life expectancy), knowledge (schooling) and material wellbeing (GNI per capita) – combined through a geometric mean into a single 0‑to‑1 score.
Each dimension of the HDI is captured by a specific index:
- Healthy life: Captured by the Life Expectancy Index, which is based on life expectancy at birth.
- Good education (knowledge): Captured by Education Index, which is based on the expected and mean years of schooling.
- Decent standard of living: Captured by Gross National Income (GNI) Index, which is based on the GNI per capita (PPP$).

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The index is estimated by normalizing and aggregating the above indicators. First, the indicators are brought onto the same scale, ranging from 0 to 1. This is done by setting minimum and maximum values for each indicator. The minimum and maximum values for each indicator are defined as follows:
- Life expectancy at birth ranges between 20 and 85 years
- Expected years of schooling between 0 and 18 years; Mean years of schooling, between 0 and 15 years
- GNI per capita between 100 and 75,000 international-$ at 2021 prices.
The HDI is then estimated as the geometric mean of these indices. The education index is the arithmetic mean (average) of the mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling.

Data sources

UNDP, Human Development Report – Human Development Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people's choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people's imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, the 2025's Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.

For more details, refer to https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/documentation-and-downloads

Retrieved on

May 7, 2025

Retrieved from

https://hdr.undp.org/

Citation

This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data.

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

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UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

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UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Human Development Index – UNDP” [dataset]. UNDP, Human Development Report, “Human Development Report” [original data]. Retrieved June 12, 2026 from https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index

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https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

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=IMPORTDATA("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

Python with Pandas

import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()

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library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

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import delimited "https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-development-index.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear