Fuzzy ranking of human development: A proposal

In this paper we propose to measure human development as a fuzzy concept. We stress that there exists a great deal of vagueness in quantifying a country's level of human development; one such source of vagueness is the weighting scheme embedded in the well-publicized UNDP's Human Development Index (HDI). We propose to evaluate the resulting fuzziness in human development ranking with a truth value function. A truth value is simply a function of the probability that a randomly drawn bundle of weights will rank one country to have a higher HDI than another country. We derive simple and easily computable formulae for calculating the truth value. The method derived is equally applicable to fuzzy rankings with other composite indices.