Human development index and the Paralympics

The Paralympics and the Olympics had their closing ceremony today.  Many people have been inspired and entertained by the sporting phenomenon.  It is an even that both serves to motivate those that watch it and on occasion educate and inform as well.  Whether it was seeing the first ever female Olympians from the Kingdom of Saud (regardless of the backroom politics) or Paralympians overcoming adversity.

So this got me thinking.  One thing that can be said is that people with disabilities already face challenges in their lives that others do not have to contend with.  This, to me, makes their stories all the more amazing and incredible.  On this level it does not matter if they can or cannot achieve the same results as the athletes in the Olympics.  It is incredible and awe-inspiring to simply see the spirit with which these people are imbued.  The determination that they have to have to make it past their setbacks and earn the title of athlete.  

Sadly, little of this is free.  The treatment of many disabilities is a costly medical process.  To that end, it has been the case that countries with more advanced medical systems and those with more developed societies have tended to provide better care for those that are less fortunate.  This is where my thinking led me to.  I started wondering if there was any connection between the human development level of a country and the number of Paralympians it had representing it.  

I took data for the number of Paralympians and combined this with the 2011 Human Development Index figures.  I compared this to the top 80 countries in the Paralympics ranked by number of athletes.   This was to remove a large tail end of data, comprising of smaller countries that fielded solitary or only 2 athletes, that would skew the results.  Incidentally, Jamaica being number 84 on this list, was omitted even though it is the home of the Olympics' superstar; Usain Bolt.

And here it is.  Nothing spectacular to be honest, but there is a noticeable increase in the desired direction.  When HDI is taken into account there is a slight increase in the number of Paralympians.  This correlation is relatively weak at 0.31, however, it is made harder to compare the data like for like as the countries have vastly different population numbers.  This can skew the result where a country simply has a larger "resource" from where to find talented and motivated athletes, who simply happen to be disabled in this study.  Performing a natural log on the athlete numbers to partially mitigate the large extremes and outliers actually increases the correlation to 0.39.

Without moving too far in the direction of an after school special, I hope that some of this data is real; and that it shows that increasing HDI does lead to better care of and opportunities for people with disabilities.