Human development index and sustainability: what's the correlation?

Abstract

Human development index (HDI), published annually by the United Nations Development Program has been widely argued for several reasons. In particular, HDI do not take into account concepts of sustainable development. In a line with this, besides already used indicators (such as GDP per capita, literacy rate, etc.), we suggest new indicator.. Ecological Footprint (EF). The EF is the unique indicator which synthesizes environmental indicators for measuring a country's welfare. Further on, we analyzed economic, social, health and environmental components as variables of EU countries' welfare through the use of statistical I-distance method. The results presented in this study clearly demonstrate the importance of EF as one of the most significant indicator for measuring a country's welfare.