Gross national income per capita
Human Asset Index
Economic Vulnerability Index

Gross national income (GNI) per capita

GNI per capita is equal to the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) minus per capita primary incomes payable to non-resident units plus per capita primary incomes receivable from non-resident units. Values are expressed in current United States dollars, calculated according to the World Bank Atlas method, and reflect a simple average of three years (2000, 2001 and 2002 for the 2006 triennial review).

• Data sources: The primary source is the World Bank database. The historical series is available from the World Development Indicators database, and data for the most recent year are available from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GNIPC.pdf. Information on country classification over the years can be found at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/OGHIST.xls. Estimates of GNI per capita for countries not reported in World Bank sources are calculated with available data from the Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNSTAT), available from http://data.un.org.

Human Assets Index (HAI)

Percentage of population undernourished

Indicates the prevalence of undernourishment in the total population, that is to say, the proportion of the population whose dietary consumption continuously falls below an established minimum dietary energy requirement for maintaining a healthy life and carrying out light physical activity.

• Data Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Food Security Statistics, available from http://www.fao.org/faostat/foodsecurity/index_en.htm
  

Under five mortality rate

Assesses the probability of dying between birth and age five. It is expressed as deaths per 1,000 births.

• Data sources: Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects database, available from http://esa.un.org/unpp/ and http://data.un.org.
  

Gross secondary school enrolment ratio

Number of pupils enrolled in secondary schools, regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of the population in the theoretical age group for the same level of education.

• Data sources: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, available from http://www.uis.unesco.org (section on education). Estimates for countries not reported by UNESCO were obtained from the following sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators database; United Nations Development Programme, Pacific Human Development Report (various issues); and Asian Development Bank, Key Indicators 2005, available from: http://www.adb.org/documents/books/key_indicators/.
  

Adult literacy rate

Number of literate persons aged fifteen and above expressed as a percentage of the total population in that age group. A person is considered literate if he/she can read and write, with understanding, a simple statement related to his/her daily life.

• Data sources: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Literacy and non-Formal Education Section, Youth (15-24) and Adult (15+) Literacy Rates by Country and by Gender for 2002-2004, August 2005 Assessment, available from http://www.uis.unesco.org/TEMPLATE/html/Exceltables/education/Literacy_National_August2005.xls. For countries not reported by UNESCO, information was obtained from the United Nations Statistics Division databases, available from http://data.un.org.
  

Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI)

Population

De facto population in a country as of 1 July of the year indicated.

• Data source: Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, available from http://data.un.org.
  

Remoteness (location index)

• Data sources: Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International (FERDI), Centre for Study and Research for International Development (CERDI) of the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France.
  

Merchandise export concentration

Expressed as Herfindahl-Hirschmann indices derived from three-digit SITC product categories (Revision 2 was used for the 2006 triennial review). For the purposes of the review of the list of LDCs, the Herfindahl-Hirschmann index is defined as the sum of squares of the percentages of the shares of each commodity as a proportion of total exports. If a country exports only one commodity, the index is 10,000. If there is a (near) infinite number of commodities with near-zero market shares each, the index is approximately zero. Results are normalized, however, and range from 0 to 1 (maximum concentration).

• Sources of data: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Handbook of International Trade and Development Statistics (various issues). Hirschmann indices are estimated with data from UNSTAT for countries where data from the UNCTAD source are not available.
  

Share of agriculture, forestry and fisheries in GDP

The statistical series “agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing as percentages of GDP” is generated from national accounts value added at current prices (in United States dollars).

• Sources of data: United Nations Statistics Division, United Nations National Accounts Main Aggregates Database, available from http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/selectionbasicFast.asp.
  

Homelessness due to natural disasters

Homelessness is defined as “people needing immediate assistance for shelter after a natural disaster”, where a disaster is defined as “a situation or event, which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request at the national or international level for assistance; an unforeseen and often sudden event that causes great damage, destruction and human suffering”. The statistical series used in the calculations is the “number of homeless due to natural disasters during the period 1990-2004” expressed as a percentage of population in 1997. For countries with missing data, available data on the total number of persons affected by natural disasters were used to estimate the homelessness.

• Sources of data: Emergency Disasters Database (EM-DAT), which is maintained by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), available at http://www.emdat.be/; and, World Bank, World Development Indicators database.
  

Instability of agricultural production

• Sources of data: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The agricultural production data are published by FAO for the period 1979-2004 as a volume index with 1999-2001=100 (available at http://faostat.fao.org/site/339/default.aspx).

Instability of exports of goods and services

Represents the value of exports of goods and services (in current United States dollars expressed as index numbers) deflated by an index of import unit values. The result approximates a measure commonly referred to as the purchasing power of exports, which is an indicator of the country’s capacity to import goods and services from current export earnings. The instability index is calculated by regression of a trend equation for exports (deflated by import unit values) and using the standard error of the regression as the indicator of instability.

• Sources of data: International Monetary Fund, Balance of Payments Statistics Yearbook and International Financial Statistics Yearbook. Supplementary sources for export data are IMF, Direction of Trade Statistics and the United Nations Comtrade database of UNSTAT. Import unit values are obtained from the UNSTAT’s Monthly Bulletin of Statistics.