Human Capital Index Plus
The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) is a cross-country index produced by the World Bank that measures the human capital a child born today could expect to accumulate over their working life if current health, education, and employment conditions persisted.[1] The index combines internationally comparable indicators with estimates from economic research on how health, learning, and work experience relate to earnings and productivity.[1][2]
The HCI+ extends the World Bank's earlier Human Capital Index, which followed human capital accumulation only through age 18. The revised measure continues through working life, adding tertiary education, the transition from school to work, and learning through employment.[1][2] It was released in 2026 alongside the World Bank's Building Human Capital Where It Matters: Homes, Neighborhoods, and Workplaces, the institution's 2026 Human Capital Report.[3]
Methodology
[edit]The HCI+ is the sum of three component scores:[4]
- Health and nutrition, based on adult survival between ages 15 and 60 and the share of children under age five who are not stunted.
- Education, based on expected years of pre-primary, primary, and secondary schooling, harmonized learning outcomes, and tertiary completion.
- Employment, based on labor-force participation, employment, and the share of workers in wage employment, calculated separately for young people and working-age adults.
The components are converted to a common scale using weights drawn from empirical estimates of their relationships with earnings and productivity.[1] The maximum score is 325, comprising maximum component scores of 50 for health, 188 for education, and 87 for employment.[4] The index is expressed in log-earnings units multiplied by 100. For moderate differences, a one-point difference corresponds approximately to a one-percent difference in expected lifetime labor earnings. This presentation is intended to make changes in the score interpretable in economic terms and to allow the contribution of each component to be identified separately.[1][2] Larger differences compound and therefore cannot be read as simple percentage changes.[1][4]
The HCI+ uses a synthetic-cohort approach. It does not forecast the actual outcomes of children born in the reference year. Instead, it estimates the human capital that a newborn would accumulate if the health, education, and labor-market outcomes observed at each age in that year remained unchanged throughout the person's life.[1]
Relationship to the Human Capital Index
[edit]The original Human Capital Index focused on the human capital that a child born today could expect to attain by age 18, given prevailing health and education conditions. The HCI+ extends the horizon to age 65 and includes tertiary education and the human capital gained, or lost, during working life.[1][2] Its employment component distinguishes between youth and working-age adults and reflects whether people work, whether they are employed, and whether their jobs are associated with greater opportunities for learning through experience.[1] The HCI+ also uses an additive scale rather than the earlier index's normalized 0-to-1 scale, allowing the score to be decomposed into health, education, and employment components.[1]
Data sources and coverage
[edit]The HCI+ draws on harmonized international data maintained by the United Nations Population Division, the UNICEF–World Health Organization–World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the World Bank, and ILOSTAT.[4] The published dataset provides estimates for 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2025, with coverage varying by indicator and economy.[5]
The World Bank publishes the underlying data, documentation, and replication code in a public repository. The repository includes raw inputs, processing programs, output datasets, a codebook, and instructions for reproducing the index.[6]
Findings
[edit]The 2025 global population-weighted HCI+ average was about 186. The World Bank estimated that children born in low- and middle-income countries could earn about 51 percent more over their working lives if their countries matched the human capital outcomes achieved by relatively high-performing economies at similar income levels.[4][2] Countries with similar income levels often recorded substantially different scores, which the World Bank used to argue that available resources alone did not account for observed differences in human capital outcomes.[4]
Education and employment accounted for more cross-country variation than the health component.[4] The employment component was introduced to capture the idea that human capital formation continues after formal schooling. It applies higher assumed returns to wage employment than to non-wage work and allows for skill depreciation during periods outside employment.[1][2]
The index is also reported separately for women and men. Globally, the 2025 female score was about 20 points below the male score. The difference was concentrated in employment rather than health or education, with the largest regional gaps reported in South Asia and in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.[4][2]
Coverage and use
[edit]Following its release, the HCI+ was discussed in national and regional media, often through comparisons with countries at similar income levels or with neighboring economies. Coverage in Kenya, Rwanda, and Vietnam focused on their identification as relatively strong performers for their income levels.[7][8][9] The Kenya News Agency reported that Kenya received a Human Capital Champion Award during an event held alongside the 2026 World Bank–International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings and described the country as performing above the average for Sub-Saharan Africa and for lower-middle-income economies.[7] Vietnam Investment Review reported that Vietnam was recognized at the meetings as one of five strong performers within its income group, together with Jamaica, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, and Rwanda.[9]
Other reporting used the index to discuss country-specific constraints. The Express Tribune linked Pakistan's score to weak learning outcomes, limited training, and the concentration of workers in low-productivity employment.[10] The Manila Bulletin compared the Philippines with Vietnam and reported that education accounted for the largest part of the difference between their scores, followed by employment and health.[11] The Times of Central Asia discussed changes in Kazakhstan's position over time and attributed the reported improvement to developments in education, health, and workforce skills.[12]
The index has also been used in World Bank regional and thematic analysis. A 2026 analysis of Europe and Central Asia used the HCI+ to distinguish gaps in foundational health and education, the use of human capital in labor markets, and preparation for demographic and technological change.[13] Another World Bank analysis applied the index to fragile and conflict-affected settings, arguing that losses in homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces can reinforce one another and make recovery more difficult.[14]
Interactive application
[edit]The World Bank maintains an interactive HCI+ application that allows users to compare economies, examine component and indicator values, and identify the parts of a score associated with health, education, and employment.[15] The application includes comparisons with economies at similar levels of income, sex-disaggregated results, downloadable charts and data, and a simulator that recalculates the index after users change selected health, education, or labor-market indicators.[15][2]
Limitations
[edit]The methodology note describes the HCI+ as a summary measure constrained by the availability of comparable cross-country data. It does not directly measure all dimensions of health or human capital, and its aggregation requires simplifying assumptions about relationships among health, education, and employment outcomes.[1] The measure emphasizes the contribution of human capital to earnings and productivity rather than the intrinsic value of health, education, or employment.[1] Data availability and recency also vary across components, with survey-based measures such as learning outcomes, stunting, and tertiary attainment generally updated less frequently than survival and labor-market indicators.[4]
Data access
[edit]Country and aggregate HCI+ values are available through the World Bank's online indicator page and the Human Capital Index Plus dataset in the World Bank Data Catalog.[16][5] The reproducibility repository provides downloadable data, a codebook, source files, and the programs used to construct the index.[6]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Decerf, Benoît; D'Souza, Ritika; Schady, Norbert; Silva, Joana; Stacy, Brian William (2026). The Human Capital Index Plus 2026: Methodology Note (Report). World Bank. hdl:10986/44306.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Stacy, Brian; D'Souza, Ritika; Schady, Norbert; Silva, Joana; Holla, Alaka; Chen, Eugene (20 April 2026). "Five things you can learn from the new Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+)". World Bank Data Blog. World Bank. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ Holla, Alaka; Schady, Norbert; Silva, Joana (2026). Building Human Capital Where It Matters: Homes, Neighborhoods, and Workplaces (Report). World Bank. ISBN 978-1-4648-2277-3.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 World Bank (2026). The Human Capital Index Plus 2026: Findings Brief (Report). World Bank. doi:10.1596/44305. hdl:10986/44305.
- 1 2 "Human Capital Index Plus". World Bank Data Catalog. World Bank. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- 1 2 "Human Capital Index Plus reproducibility package". GitHub. World Bank. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- 1 2 Ng'ang'a, Joseph (17 April 2026). "World Bank awards Kenya as a Human Capital Champion". Kenya News Agency. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ Acquaye, Nana Appiah (31 May 2026). "Rwanda recognized by World Bank as top performer on Human Capital Index Plus". TechReviewAfrica. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- 1 2 Van, Thanh (20 April 2026). "Vietnam recognised among top performers in World Bank human capital index". Vietnam Investment Review. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ Hanif, Usman (2 May 2026). "Human capital ranking falls". The Express Tribune. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ de Vera, Ben Arnold (29 June 2026). "Philippines lags Vietnam, regional peers in World Bank's human capital index". Manila Bulletin. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ Ismailo, Vagit (15 April 2026). "Kazakhstan Climbs 13 Positions in the World Bank Human Capital Ranking". The Times of Central Asia. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ Rutkowski, Michal; Santos, Indhira; Christian, Jamexis; Rodriguez-Segura, Daniel (2 April 2026). "Three human capital gaps holding back jobs in Europe and Central Asia". World Bank Blogs. World Bank. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ Vagneron, Caroline (4 June 2026). "The Arithmetic of Destruction: How Conflict Compounds Human Capital Loss". World Bank Blogs. World Bank. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- 1 2 "What is the Human Capital Index Plus?". World Bank. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
- ↑ "Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+)". World Bank. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
External links
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