The Human Development Index (HDI), developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), serves as a comprehensive metric for ranking countries by their level of human development. By incorporating three fundamental aspects of human progress—health, education, and standard of living—the HDI provides a more nuanced view of development beyond economic indicators.
This article looks into the data from the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2025, examining HDI trends across countries and regions from 1990 to 2023—the most current year for which data are available.
Human Development Index scores for 2023
The interactive table below presents the 2023 rankings and scores of countries based on their Human Development Index (HDI) values. The overall score ranges from 0 to 1 — where higher values indicate higher levels of human development.
The overall HDI scores reflect how countries perform across the three dimensions covered by the Index:
- Long and healthy life: Assessed through life expectancy at birth
- Knowledge: Assessed through a combination of expected years of schooling (EYS) and mean years of schooling (MYS). The former forecasts the total years of education a child is expected to undertake, while the latter reflects the current educational attainment of the adult population.
- A decent standard of Living: Assessed through Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).
To facilitate comparison across different contexts, the indicators are normalized on a scale from 0 to 1, using established minimum and maximum values (goalposts). The HDI itself is calculated as the geometric mean of these normalized indices, ensuring that improvements in any dimension are equally weighted.
The rankings for 2023 highlights significant disparities in human development across the globe. At the top, Iceland had a HDI score of 0.972, closely followed by Norway and Switzerland at 0.970. The lowest HDI scores in 2023 were in South Sudan (0.388), Somalia (0.404) and Central African Republic (0.414).
For further details about the country rankings, and performance across the underlying indicators, the interactive table below looks closer at the data for each of the three dimensions making up the overall Human Development Index.
Tracking country trends over time
The interactive table below shows Human Development Index (HDI) trends over selected years, including 1990, 2000, 2015 and 2023, accompanied by average annual growth in HDI-scores from 1990-2023, 2000-2023 and 2015-2023.
Compared to 1990, Mozambique, Niger and Guinea have seen the largest annual growth rates in their HDI scores. Still, in 2022, Mozambique and Niger were ranked among the lowest in the world at 182 and 188 respectively.
The country trends over time can also be viewed in this multiple line chart (not embedded on this site due to loading performance for this page). Note that in the line charts, the country score is showns as a blue line, and the world average as a orange line.
Tracking regional and global trends over time
There has been a consistent increase in the HDI scores over the past decades, reflecting global progress in health, education, and standard of living.
A closer look at the different regions from 1990 to 2023 shows different developmental paths across the globe. Since 1990, East Asia and the Pacific have seen the highest average annual growth in the HDI score. Since 2000 and 2015, South Asia had the highest.
About the data
The data used on this page is from UNDP, published in the Human Development Report 2025.
Changelog
- Updated in May 2025 with new HDI data up to 2023.
- Initial release March 2024 covering HDI data up to 2022.