Over the past decade, many countries have made important progress in improving human capital

MOST COUNTRIES ACHIEVED HUMAN CAPITAL GAINS IN THE DECADE BEFORE COVID-19
Since this is the first update of the HCI, the 2020 release presents an opportunity to assess the evolution of human capital outcomes as measured by the index over the last decade. The HCI is based on outcomes that typically change slowly from year to year. Some of them—such as stunting and educational test scores—are measured infrequently, every three to five years. As a result, changes in the HCI over a short period are small and may simply reflect updates to some components that are measured sporadically but not others.
To provide more reliable insights on countries’ human capital trajectories over time, this report focuses on changes in the index over the past decade. To this end, a (circa) 2010 version of the HCI is constructed with data carefully curated to maximize comparability with the 2020 results. In particular, only those countries where learning scores were measured by the same international assessment program in 2010 and 2020 enter the comparison.3 The resulting sample for the 2010 HCI includes 103 countries. As measured by the HCI, human capital progressed in the vast majority of countries in this sample. On average, between 2010 and 2020, the HCI improved by 2.6 percentage points, about 4 percent of its average value in 2010.5 One economy in four that experienced a rise in the index recorded gains of more than five percentage points. This means that, in those countries, the productivity of future workers approached the frontier of full productivity by five percentage points – a substantial achievement. Economies starting from lower levels of human capital improved by larger amounts. Better health (child and adult survival and stunting) accounts for about half of the HCI’s changes. Increased enrollments—especially at pre-primary and secondary school levels—account for the bulk of remaining changes. In contrast, progress on
learning outcomes has proved difficult, as international test scores failed to keep pace with enrollment
gains in many settings.
In the human capital dimensions captured by the index, girls and boys made similar progress over time,
with only a handful of countries reporting opposite trends. In the 90 countries where disaggregated data
are available and comparisons with 2010 are possible, the average gender ratio is similar in 2010 and
2020, at about 1.06 in favor of girls. Around 2010, the HCI was uniformly larger among girls than among
boys, with the exception of seven economies. Among these, the girl-boy ratio improved, approaching or
surpassing gender parity, in all but of one country over the past decade.