Human Capital Project : HCI Compass
The Human Capital Index (HCI) Compass is a guidance note for clients' own assessment of progress towards HCI. The launch of the Human Capital Index (HCI) in October 2018 spurred an interesting conversation on the state of the world in terms of...
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/116021588091005173/Human-Capital-Project-HCI-Compass http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33671 |
| Summary: | The Human Capital Index (HCI) Compass is
a guidance note for clients' own assessment of progress
towards HCI. The launch of the Human Capital Index (HCI) in
October 2018 spurred an interesting conversation on the
state of the world in terms of preparing the current
generation to the challenges of the future labor market. By
successfully highlighting the depth of the human capital
crisis and enabling policy makers to see spending in the
social sectors as investments that reap benefits in the long
run, the index demonstrated its usefulness as an advocacy
tool. Partly due to the success of the advocacy effort, the
immediate questions policy makers posed were 'what to
do to improve the HCI?' and 'how best to track
progress considering the slowly-moving nature of the index.
The HCI Compass is a response to this query. First, it aims
to help countries answer the question: "What do we need
to do to improve our HCI and its sub components (child
survival, adult survival, stunting, years of schooling, test
scores)?" It does so by providing a checklist of key
policies, legal framework and aspects of service delivery
that characterize countries with good human capital outcomes
and/or are proven to be important to improving the key
components of the HCI. Pinpointing the set of policies and
interventions that drive human capital outcomes is
complicated by the fact that the underlying production
function and how the different factors interact to produce
outcomes is not straight forward. As such, some of the
policies and service delivery indicators identified in the
compass could be mere correlates rather than determinants of
human capital formation. The relative importance of the
indicators would also vary based on where a country
currently stands and as such, the need to tailor it to each
country context. Second, it aims to help countries answer
the linked questions: "How well are these policies
working? And how do we know we are on track?" It does
so by identifying intermediate outcome variables and
benchmark variables that will help policymakers assess
progress on the ground towards a better HCI. We can think of
these variables both as the intermediate results of the
policies recommended above, and as "leading
indicators" of what will happen to the HCI over time. |
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