The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has ranked Egypt 115th of 189 countries in 2018’s Human Development Index (HDI), down from 111th place in 2017.
Egypt’s HDI ranked it solidly in the middle of 22 Arab states (11th), with such countries as the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon, Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia and Libya representing the top half.
The HDI is a composite index that takes into account three basic components of human development: income per capita, (calculated by US Dollar), average expected age age, and markers of education including literacy rates.
Optimistically, the UNDP’s report reveals that despite a global population increase of 2.2 billion between 1990 and 2017, the number of people deemed to suffer from low levels of human development dropped from 3 billion to 926 million.
Meanwhile, those living in high levels of human development increased from 1.2 billion to 3.8 billion.
Norway topped the global HDI rankings with 0.953, followed by Switzerland (0.944), Australia (0.939), Ireland (0.938), and Germany (0.936).
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm.
