The HDI, as a measure of development, has not remained static. In the period from 1990 to 1994 the HDI was successively modified in response to pertinent observations. But as from the 1994 Global Human Development Report, the HDI methodology was standardised in order to make the index more precise (UNDP, 1994: 90-95). In 1999, the treatment of the index under went a further alteration, with a change in the treatment of income. The alteration was intended to correct the excessive discount which penalised efforts to increase incomes by substantially reducing the weight of real per capita GDP in the HDI as from the threshold.

The HDI makes it possible to compare countries from a global perspective. In the GHDR, countries are classified into three groups:

Countries of low human development (HDI of up to 0.499);

Countries of medium human development (HDI of between 0.500and 0.799):

Countries of high human development (HDI equal to or greater than 0.800).

Chapter two of this Report devotes a section to analysing the overall performance of Mozambique's HDI. With an estimated HDI of 0.341 2 in 1998, Mozambique was classified among the seven countries with the lowest human development indices in the world, higher only than Guinea-Bissau, Burundi, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone (UNDP, 2000: 160).

The usefulness of the HDI does not lie merely in making it possible to classify the countries of the world according to the typology created by the GHDRs. Above all, it is an instrument that allows development analysts to construct indicators for analysis, and influence reflections on the planning process and intervention in development at various levels.