Human Development Index and Multidimensional Poverty Index: Evidence on their Reliability and Validity

The paper tests the reliability and the validity of the Human Development Index (HDI) from the United Nations Development Programme and the Multidimen-sional Poverty Index (MPI) from the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative. The results indicate that there is strong reliability within metric; and that there is strong validity between metrics. The findings imply that both HDI—more specifically, the inverse, (1-HDI)—and MPI embody equivalent descriptions about the level of human development or the lack of it.