REASSESSING EFFICIENCY IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AMONG OECD COUNTRIES

The measurement of human development has a potentially strong impact on investigation of development gap and building of new policies. In broad terms, the human development approach appeared as a means to reallocate human beings at the center of the actions related to politics, economy, and society. Therefore correct and fair measurement has got a great importance. The human development index (HDI) is a measure of human development based on the three major dimensions such as longevity, knowledge, and standard of living. In this paper, the assessment of the HDI for the OECD countries is reconsidered in the light of data envelopment analysis (DEA). The aim is therefore to provide complementary information for efficiency measure of HD in OECD countries. Instead of a ranking the countries, human development is benchmarked on the basis of empirical observations of the best practice countries by applying output-oriented DEA. As a result of the correlation analysis, there is a highly strong positive correlation between normalized HDI values and the values that we calculated from output oriented DEA model. Hence, the values that we calculated from DEA model fit HDI results. Both HDI and DEA results yield the same three topmost (Norway, Australia, and Switzerland) and the three lowermost countries (Hungary, Turkey, and Mexico).