Sustainable development and human development index

Abstract

The scientific discussions in existing literature focusing on sustainable development are vast. The broad focus of sustainable development has raised the need to develop indicators which allow measuring the progress towards sustainability and evaluating policies intended to support sustainability. This research aims to analyse and determine the relationship between the Human Development Index (HDI) and some of the sustainable development indicators partly comprised in the Sustainable Society Index (SS1). Using data for the period of 2001-2010 from selected eleven EU countries, the goal of this paper to shed some light on the main shortages of the HDI as a measure of sustainable development. The findings of this research show that in most cases the HDI ignores sustainable development indicators, making it a partly fit measure and that there are no cases where the HDI can be described as an absolutely correct measure of sustainable development.