Ranking Countries’ Development Objectively

The broadly accepted Human Development Index HDI is an example of ways to rank countries with statistical indicators. The HDI comprises three primary social indicators: Life expectancy, income and schooling. It has severe defects of methodology and is biased by data transformations. Here these shortcomings are eliminated by ranking directly from the ranks of the component indicators. The Development Ranks DR that emerge are significantly different from the HDI ranks. The methodology is simple and general. It can be universally applied to other compound-indicators and the rankings indices for guidance on policy goals.