This article presents a list of counties of Albania by Human Development Index (HDI), which is a comparative measure of life expectancy, education, literacy, standard of living, per capita income and overall well-being of the citizens in each counties of Albania.
Introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990, the Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic of education, income and longevity indices, calculated in order to measure social and economic development within countries. [1] It consists of a number between 0 and 1, comprising five tiers of human development—very low, low, medium, high, or very high—wherein the development is considered higher when closer to 1. According to the latest Human Development Report, published in 2024 and reflecting data from 2022, Albania placed List of countries by Human Development Index 74 among 193 countries with an HDI value of 0.789. [2]
| Rank | County | HDI (2022) | Similar Country | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Very high human development | ||||||||||||||||
| 1 |  Tirana | 0.814 |  Trinidad and Tobago  Georgia | |||||||||||||
| High human development | ||||||||||||||||
| 2 |  Vlorë | 0.797 |  Palau | |||||||||||||
| 3 |  Durrës | 0.796 |  Mauritius | |||||||||||||
| 4 | Gjirokastër | 0.789 |  China | |||||||||||||
| – |  Albania (average) | 0.789 | ||||||||||||||
| 5 |  Korçë | 0.785 |  Armenia | |||||||||||||
| 6 |  Elbasan | 0.779 |  Bosnia and Herzegovina | |||||||||||||
| 7 | Shkodër | 0.778 | ||||||||||||||
| 8 |  Berat | 0.776 | ||||||||||||||
| 9 | Lezhë | 0.764 |  Cuba | |||||||||||||
| 10 | Fier | 0.762 |  Maldives  Peru | |||||||||||||
| 11 | Dibër | 0.749 |  Libya | |||||||||||||
| 12 |  Kukës | 0.745 |  Algeria | |||||||||||||
| Source: [2] [3] | ||||||||||||||||
A developed country, or advanced country, is a sovereign state that has a high quality of life, developed economy, and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations. Most commonly, the criteria for evaluating the degree of economic development are the gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), the per capita income, level of industrialization, amount of widespread infrastructure and general standard of living. Which criteria are to be used and which countries can be classified as being developed are subjects of debate. Different definitions of developed countries are provided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; moreover, HDI ranking is used to reflect the composite index of life expectancy, education, and income per capita. In 2023, 40 countries fit all four criteria, while an additional 19 countries fit three out of four.
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores a higher level of HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the gross national income GNI (PPP) per capita is higher. It was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq and was further used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Human Development Report Office.
The Human Poverty Index (HPI) was an indication of the poverty of community in a country, developed by the United Nations to complement the Human Development Index (HDI) and was first reported as part of the Human Development Report in 1997. It is developed by United Nations Development Program which also publishes indexes like HDI It was considered to better reflect the extent of deprivation in deprived countries compared to the HDI. In 2010, it was supplanted by the UN's Multidimensional Poverty Index.
The Human Development Report (HDR) is an annual Human Development Index report published by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The Gender Development Index (GDI) is an index designed to measure gender equality.
The concept of human development expands upon the notion of economic development to include social, political and even ethical dimensions. Since the mid-twentieth century, international organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank have adopted human development as a holistic approach to evaluating a country’s progress that considers living conditions, social relations, individual freedoms and political institutions that contribute to freedom and well-being, in addition to standard measures of income growth.
Multidimensional Poverty Indices uses a range of indicators to calculate a summary poverty figure for a given population, in which a larger figure indicates a higher level of poverty. This figure considers both the proportion of the population that is deemed poor and the 'breadth' of poverty experienced by these 'poor' households, following the Alkire & Foster 'counting method'. The method was developed following increased criticism of monetary and consumption-based poverty measures, seeking to capture the deprivations in non-monetary factors that contribute towards well-being. While there is a standard set of indicators, dimensions, cutoffs and thresholds used for a 'Global MPI', the method is flexible and there are many examples of poverty studies that modify it to best suit their environment. The methodology has been mainly, but not exclusively, applied to developing countries.
The Gender Inequality Index (GII) is an index for the measurement of gender disparity that was introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report 20th anniversary edition by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). According to the UNDP, this index is a composite measure to quantify the loss of achievement within a country due to gender inequality. It uses three dimensions to measure opportunity cost: reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation. The new index was introduced as an experimental measure to remedy the shortcomings of the previous indicators, the Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), both of which were introduced in the 1995 Human Development Report.
Measures of gender equality or inequality are statistical tools employed to quantify the concept of gender equality.
