Construction of Household-Based Human Development Index : New District-Level Evidence for Punjab, Pakistan

A popular critique of the human development index (HDI) is that it does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country. Building on a household-based human development index (HHDI), we used relevant and comprehensive indicators to reconstruct the sub-indices of the HHDI, namely for health and housing, respectively. We then applied the newly constructed HHDI to directly assess the level of human development at a district-sub-group level for the Punjab province in Pakistan. The HHDI results confirm differences in human development between districts and across households with specific characteristics. The results also support the importance of the decomposed HHDI, namely housing, to provide a better understanding of the relative deprivations of different households