New historical estimates of the human development index

This paper discusses different alternatives to construct the conventional Historical Human Development Index that considers three dimensions: income, health,and education. We discuss the outcome of different models in terms of aggregated improvements in human development, the rankings of performance, relative growth, the contributions to performance of the different dimensions, and the tradeoffs between the three dimensions. The purpose of the paper is to propose an index that we consider better fits historical development and that provides the less possible gaps in the tradeoffs between the different components of the index. Such an index can be considered the best proxy on which to base policy recommendations. The paper works with a sample of 18 countries of seven regions for 1900-2010.