Application of principal component analysis on human development indicators: temporal approach from 1999 to 2010

摘要

In this study, we performed a weighted principal component analysis on human development indicators to measure and analyze the progress of well-being throughout the world from 1999 to 2010. The main principal component (MPC) was employed to quantify the temporal changes of the human development of several selected countries by the proposed Z-test. The trends of the human development in some countries with high human development, Sub-Saharan African countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC), the USA, and Qatar were discussed in terms of the impact of public health and economic development. We also studied the association of the MPC obtained from our study and the human development index reported by the United Nations Development Program using the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.