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 most recent UNDP’s Human Development Report, examining HDI trends across countries and regions from 1990 to 2022—the most current year for which data are available.
Human Development Index scores for 2022
The interactive table below presents the 2022 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 2022 highlights significant disparities in human development across the globe. At the top, Switzerland had a HDI score of 0.967, closely followed by Norway at 0.966, and Iceland at 0.959. Hong Kong, China (SAR), and Sweden rounded out the top five with scores of 0.956 and 0.952, respectively.
The lowest HDI scores in 2022 were in Somalia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Chad, and Niger.
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.
A comparison between Switzerland, the highest-ranking country, and Somalia, among the lowest, starkly illustrates the vast disparities in development across these dimensions:
- Life expectancy at birth: In Switzerland, life expectancy stands at 84.3 years, among the highest in the world. Conversely, Somalia’s life expectancy is significantly lower at 56.1 years, highlighting critical health and living condition disparities.
- Education: In Switzerland, the expected years of schooling reach 16.6 years, with a current mean years of schooling at 13.9 years. Somalia’s figures are much lower, with 7.6 expected years of schooling and a mean years of schooling of only 1.9 years.
- Living standards: Switzerland’s gross national income per capita stands at $69,432 (2017 PPP$), roughly 65 times that of Somalia’s which stands ats $1,072 (2017 PPP$).
Tracking country trends over time
The interactive table below shows Human Development Index (HDI) trends over selected years, including 1990, 2000, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2021, and 2022, accompanied by percentage changes from 2022 compared to 1990, 2000, 2015, and 2021.
Compared to 1990, Mozambique, Niger and Myanmar have seen the largest % increases in their HDI scores. Still, in 2022, Mozambique and Niger were ranked among the lowest in the world at 183 and 189 respectively.
Since 2015, Bangladesh has seen the largest increase, while Botswana saw the largest increase from 2021 to 2022. Notably, since 2015, several countries have seen a decline in their scores, including Timor-Leste, Venezuela and Yemen.
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. However, the years 2020 to 2022 diverge from this longstanding trend, with the world average score in 2022 the same as in 2019. The impact of the global pandemic in 2020 meant that the HDI score fell for the first time from 0.739 in 2019 to 0.736 in 2020, continuing to fall to 0.735 in 2021, before returning to the 2019 level of 0.739 in 2022.
A closer look at the different regions from 1990 to 2022 shows different developmental paths across the globe. Since 1990, East Asia and the Pacific have seen the strongest growth (51% increase in HDI index value). Since 2000, East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa all have seen significant growth. All regions have seen a slight decline in their average HDI scores since 2015.
In 2022, the region with the hghest score was Europe and Central Asia, while the lowest was Sub-Saharan Africa at 0.549.
About the data
The data used on this page is from UNDP, published in the Human Development Report 2023-24.
Changelog
- Initial release March 2024 covering HDI data up to 2022.