Germany, not Scandinavia should be the HDI benchmark

The trigger for this article - I was traveling through Germany, and I realised that its trains, offices and public services were much better compared to the UK. This is reflected in Deutschland's stellar HDI. Normally you think of Scandinavia as the standard, but probably Germany should be. Besides US, it's the only large country that has pulled this off.

For this analysis, I have excluded India and China to avoid using a log scale x axis. Their average HDI (Human Development Index) scores over 2019–23 were 0.662 and 0.791.

As you can see, among G20 countries with fewer than 400 million people, Germany stands out. It sustains an average HDI of 0.957 across a population of more than 80 million. That too, despite high levels of immigration. In 2023, 15% of its residents were foreign nationals. It's the only country that comes very close to Scandinavia and has sustained a high HDI for the last 20 years.

As we all know, Scandinavia is the benchmark for HDI - averaging 0.961 across Denmark, Norway and Sweden. But the average Scandinavian country has only 7.3 million people. It becomes difficult to sustain a high HDI at higher population levels.

The United States is the other exception. No country in this comparison combines a population above 300 million with an HDI above 0.9. Its score of 0.930 trails Germany, but achieving it across 343 million people still makes the US an outlier.