Pakistan Human Development Index (HDI) and Global Rank

Why this matters

Growth figures say how much a country produces. This says whether its people are better off for it, which is the question most families actually care about.

Economy: The index moves slowly because schooling and life expectancy do. A country can grow its economy for years without its HDI rank improving, which is usually a sign that growth is not reaching health and education.

For you: It is the measure behind the question of whether your children will live longer and be better educated than you. Pakistan sits in UNDP's lowest band, which is where the gap is widest.

The Pakistani behind the index

The Human Development Index was introduced in 1990, in the first Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Programme. That report was produced under the direction of Mahbub ul Haq, a Pakistani economist, who pioneered the idea of human development.

His argument was that development should be judged by people's lives rather than by national income alone. The report built on the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's capabilities approach. Sen became Haq's close partner in the work, although he initially resisted reducing human development to a single number. The index was Haq's answer: one figure, alongside GDP, that tracks health, education and income together.

UNDP has published the report almost every year since 1990. Its latest edition ranks 193 countries, making the index one of the most widely used measures of human progress in the world, created by a Pakistani.

• UNDP: Inaugural Mahbub ul Haq-Amartya Sen Lecture
• UNDP: About human development
• UNDP: Human Development Index
• Licence: CC BY 3.0 IGO