Index of Marginalization vs. Human Development Index

(a) Define marginalization index

Marginalization is the social or economic process of an municipality/city/state/country becoming or being marginalized from/by the benefit recipients of globalization or national economic growth.

Index of Marginalization is calculated by the Mexican government. It concludes the differentiation of economic status and quality of life between areas in Mexico. It measures the percentage of population, in which suffers from absence of access to education, lives in inadequate housings or/and a certain level of narrowness, and is paid with insufficient income. Within the branches of these factors, the Index of Marginalization closely looks at the percentage of illiterate population older than 15, which indicates the lack of access to primary education, and the percentage of population living in dwellings without toilets, electricity, access to water, or with some level of overcrowding.

(b) Contrast one named marginalization index with the Human Development Index

Human Developing Index (HDI) measures the quality of human life with life expectancy at birth, which is correlated with level of health care, mean and expected years of schooling, which is correlated with development of education, and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, which is correlated with the economic status of a country.

We can distinguish HDI from the Index of Marginalization (calculated by the Mexican government) by looking at the different factors they measure. Index of Marginalization is

set by the Mexican government (even though other countries can have various types of index that measure marginalization). Therefore, its measurements are designed based on the conditions of marginalized communities in Mexico. It only measures marginalization on a local scale and is incomparable with global-scaled indices; while HDI is built by the generalized factors that exist in every country it considers, therefore it measures quality of life on a national and global scale. The data of HDI from different countries can be compared.