Conventional and Corrected Measures of Gender-related Development Index (GDI): What Happens to the Arab Countries Ranking?

The Gender-related Development Index (GDI) developed by the United nations Development Program has been one of the first global instrument to demonstrate that the level of gender equality in a country is not solely dependent upon a country's economic performance. However, the GDI is still closely tied to a country's gross domestic product. Moreover, Population share of the genders enter the formulation of this indicator in such a way that it favors the better performing gender. In the present note, we implement the corrections proposed by Bardhan and Klasen (1999), Mishra and Nathan (2008) and Nathan (2008) to capture this anomaly