Are Major Events Capable of Affecting Country Rankings? Validating Composite Indexes of Human Progress and Environmental Performance

A desired characteristic of composite indicators is sensitivity to major adverse events. This paper explores how major civil wars and the 2004 tsunami have influenced Human Development Index (HDI) and Environmental Performance Index (EPI) index values of the affected countries, respectively. The ana...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social indicators research 2018-12, Vol.140 (3), p.953-974
Main Authors: Oţoiu, Adrian, Ţiţan, Emilia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air quality
Critical incidents
Disaster recovery
Environmental aspects
Environmental performance
Human development
Human Geography
Indexes
Microeconomics
Natural disasters
Public Health
Quality of Life Research
Social research
Social Sciences
Socioeconomic change
Socioeconomic factors
Sociology
Tsunamis
Usefulness
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Summary:A desired characteristic of composite indicators is sensitivity to major adverse events. This paper explores how major civil wars and the 2004 tsunami have influenced Human Development Index (HDI) and Environmental Performance Index (EPI) index values of the affected countries, respectively. The analysis shows that HDI and EPI scores have barely changed, being almost exclusively due to variations in GNI/capita for HDI and air quality for EPI. This casts doubt on the composite indexes’ usefulness and their ability to reflect major environmental and societal changes in the affected countries, or shows which dimensions are truly resilient to these events and can constitute a sustainable base for postwar/post-disaster recovery. Human progress and ecological indicators may need an overhaul, in order to account for the changes that actually happen at a point in time, in order to capture substantial changes in the socio-economic and ecological fabric of a country.
ISSN:0303-8300
1573-0921
DOI:10.1007/s11205-017-1805-z