Which of the following is a statistical tool that measures a country's overall achievement in terms of health, education and income?

The correct answer is B, the United Nations Development Programme. The UNDP brought out the first Human Development Report in 1990, with the Human Development Index as its centrepiece, and it has published the report and the index since. Option A, the World Bank, publishes the World Development Report and indices such as the Human Capital Index, and for many years the Doing Business report, but not the HDI. Option C, the International Monetary Fund, publishes the World Economic Outlook and the Global Financial Stability Report, both concerned with macroeconomic conditions rather than human development. Option D, the World Economic Forum, publishes the Global Competitiveness Report and the Global Gender Gap Report, which is often confused with the UNDP's Gender Inequality Index although the two are built differently. Pairing each index with the body that publishes it is the single most useful piece of preparation for this chapter.

The correct answer is A, Mahbub ul Haq. The Pakistani economist led the team that produced the first Human Development Report for the UNDP in 1990 and designed the index, drawing on the capability approach of Amartya Sen, who advised the work. Option B, Simon Kuznets, is associated with the measurement of national income and with the Kuznets curve, which traces the relation between growth and inequality, not with human development. Option C, Morris David Morris, built the earlier Physical Quality of Life Index from life expectancy at age one, infant mortality and basic literacy, and that index is the usual distractor here. Option D, Gunnar Myrdal, wrote Asian Drama, an influential study of poverty in South Asia, and shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, but he devised no index. Remember Haq for the HDI, Sen for capabilities and Morris for the PQLI.

The correct answer is D, social inequality. The Human Development Index is built from exactly three dimensions and nothing more: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Inequality is not among them, and that is a deliberate feature of the index, which reports a country's average achievement without saying how it is distributed. Option A, life expectancy at birth, is the indicator of the health dimension. Option B, education, is captured through the mean years of schooling of adults aged twenty-five and above together with the expected years of schooling of a child entering school. Option C, per capita income, enters as gross national income per head measured at purchasing power parity, which replaced gross domestic product per head in the 2010 report. Inequality is handled by a separate measure, the Inequality-adjusted HDI, also introduced in 2010, which discounts each dimension for the inequality in its distribution; the gap between the HDI and the IHDI is read as the loss due to inequality.

The correct answer is B, gross national income per head at purchasing power parity. The switch was made in the 2010 Human Development Report. Gross national income was preferred to gross domestic product because it includes incomes earned abroad and sent home and excludes incomes earned in the country by foreigners, so it is closer to what residents can actually spend; and purchasing power parity is used so that the same basket of goods counts the same in every country. Option A describes the earlier practice of using GDP per head, and is the planted answer for candidates working from an older textbook. Option C, net national product at factor cost, is a national-accounts aggregate used in domestic statistics but not in the index. Option D, household final consumption expenditure, measures spending by households and is used in poverty estimation and in the national accounts, not in the HDI.

The correct answer is B, the geometric mean. Until 2010 the health, education and income indices were averaged arithmetically, which allowed a country to offset a very poor score in one dimension with high scores in the other two. The geometric mean removes that offset: because the three values are multiplied and the cube root taken, a low figure in any one dimension pulls the whole index down, which better reflects the idea that the three are not substitutes for one another. Option A is what the index used before 2010 and is the most common wrong answer. Option C, a weighted median, is not used in the HDI or in any of the companion indices. Option D, the harmonic mean, is used in statistics for averaging rates and ratios, and in the Human Development Report it appears in the Gender Inequality Index, but not in the HDI itself, which makes it a careful distractor.