ABSTRACT
Human Development Index (HDI) was in many ways the most tangible product of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Reports. The HDI was first presented to the world as a league table of nation states ranked in terms of their HDI value in the Human Development Report of 1990. The HDI was designed to bring about change in the world and help improve the lot of millions; its design had purpose. The use of logarithms is not the only approach applied by the UNDP to ‘squash’ income data after the caps have been applied, but over the 30 years’ history of the HDI it has been the most common. For the HDI, the UNDP have adopted various approaches to setting the maximum and minimum targets over the years; sometimes they set it themselves while on other occasions they have used the maximum and minimum values from the dataset.
