The Human Poverty Index (HPI) is an indication of the standard of living in a country, developed by the United Nations (UN) to complement the Human Development Index (HDI) and was first reported as part of the Human Development Report 2007. It was considered to better reflect the extent of deprivation in developing countries compared to the HDI. In 2010, it was supplanted by the UN’s Multidimensional Poverty Index.
The HPI concentrates on the deprivation in the three essential elements of human life already reflected in the HDI: longevity, knowledge and a decent standard of living. The HPI is derived separately for developing countries (HPI-1) and a group of select high-income OECD countries (HPI-2) to better reflect socio-economic differences and also the widely different measures of deprivation in the two groups.
