How Can Small-Scale Measures of Human Development Index (HDI) be Used to Study the Local Potential for Sustainable Economic Growth?

For many years the HDI or human development index has been a global de-facto standard to describe the potential for well-being and development of individuals in countries around the world. The index is built around three central elements: health, knowledge and standard of living and serves the purpose of moving the attention from national economics to the potential of the individual in each country. Despite its individual-centred orientation, the index is almost always constructed and compared on national levels. In this study, the index is disaggregated to municipality levels to study the local patterns. Using small scale data for all residents in Sweden, we can construct individual-centred HDI-calculations that are used to depict variations on local, to regional levels. Here the HDI aggregated to municipality level and the engineering resilience index (RCI) are compared. Observed patterns are strongly correlated with commonly used resilience indexes and the newly constructed HDI index has the benefit of being transferable and comparable on any level from nation to neighbourhood.