Human Poverty Index

The Human Poverty Index is an indication of the standard of living in a country, developed by the United Nations (UN). For highly developed countries, the UN considers that it can better reflect the extent of deprivation compared to the Human Development Index [http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/Human_development_indicators.pdf] .

It is a measure of the extent to which people in a country are not benefitting from development. HPI is a measure of deprivation whereas HDI is a measure of development, the two often being used in conjunction to establish a country's level of development and standard of living.

Where HDI consists of three main components; longevity, knowledge and standard of living, and assesses these components as development. HPI assesses the same three components from an opposite point of view to take into account factors that HDI does not include.

These three components are:

1) Longevity - measured by the proportion of the population not expected to survive to the age of 40 years.

2) Knowledge - measured by the adult illiteracy rate.

3) Standard of living - a composite value measured by the proportion of the population without access to clean water, health services, and the proportion of children under the age of 5 years who are underweight.

ources

* [http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indices/default.cfm]
* [http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/documents/technical_note_1.pdf Technical note: Calculating the human development indices]
* [http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_20072008_en_complete.pdf]
* [http://www.wacra.org/WORLD%20POVERTY%20MAP.pdf A map of world poverty that includes human poverty index Development Economics]