The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) World Human Development Report 2020 puts Gabon’s Human Development Index (HDI) at 0.703. The country is ranked 119th in the world out of 189 and 9th African out of 54 nations. Gabon moves up to the category of countries with a high HDI, in the same category as China (0.761).
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has released the 2020 edition of its World Human Development report titled, “The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene.” According to this report, Gabon’s Human Development Index (HDI) stands at 0.703, close to the global average of 0.737.
In its latest report, which uses data from 2019, UNDP adds two new items to its annual Human Development Index. The new index measures not only a country’s health, education and standard of living, but also human progress in accounting for carbon dioxide emissions and the country’s carbon footprint. This last point allowed Gabon to join the African top 10, with 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, production emissions per capita.
On the continental level, the top 10 countries taking into account the value of the human development indicator are in order: Mauritius (0.804); Seychelles (0.796); Algeria (0.748); Tunisia (0.749); Botswana (0.735); Libya (0.724); South Africa (0.709); Egypt (0.707); Gabon (0.703); Morocco (0.686). Conversely, Niger (0.394), the Central African Republic (0.397) and Chad (0.398) are the countries with the lowest HDI levels.
The HDI is in effect a composite statistical index of the measure of well-being that takes into account other factors broader than a simple measure of gross domestic product (GDP). It evaluates on a scale from 0 (very low level of human development) to 1 (high level) the level of human development of 189 countries through 3 variables which are gross national income per capita (GNI), life expectancy birth and average level of education.
The index has four categories: countries with a very high HDI (HDI equals 0.898), countries with a high HDI (0.753), countries with an average HDI (0.631) and countries with a low (0.513)
