The Subnational Human Development Database

In this paper we describe the Subnational Human Development Database. This database contains for the period 1990–2017 for 1625 regions within 161 countries the national and subnational values of the Subnational Human Development Index (SHDI), for the three dimension indices on the basis of which the SHDI is constructed – education, health and standard of living --, and for the four indicators needed to create the dimension indices -- expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling, life expectancy and gross national income per capita. The subnational values of the four indicators were computed using data from statistical offices and from the Area Database of the Global Data Lab, which contains indicators aggregated from household surveys and census datasets. Values for missing years were estimated by interpolation and extrapolation from real data. By normalizing the population-weighted averages of the indicators to their national levels in the UNDP-HDI database, values of the SHDI and its dimension indices were obtained that at national level equal their official versions of the UNDP.