Abstract
Understanding human development at the international, regional, and national level is essential to the understanding of the needs and wants of vast populations around the world. Since the late 1980's the United Nation's Development Program (UNDP) has published hundreds of reports on development at a variety of geographic extents. This project aims to apply the United Nation's Human Development Index (HDI) to the United States in order to create a sub-national HDI for the measurement of US counties. Due to the inherent spatial methodology in the development of the HDI, this project further introduces the use of geographic information systems tools in hopes of better capturing the results of the development index and employs spatial statistics as a way of identifying clusters of high and low development. The results report high regional, state, and county variation in all of the measures and outcomes associated with the sub-national HDI.
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