Originally Posted by
Nausevar
HDI is not a good metric to judge a country because it only considers 3 factors: life expectancy, years of schooling and GDP per capita. Russia's HDI is boosted by state revenue from natural resources which is not distributed evenly across the population. I looked at Russia on google maps and it's a 2nd rate country with ugly towns.
I checked the data and this is a map with wrong data, from an old German schoolbook (1971). Counting GDP is probably difficult and subject to some manipulations, especially from communist dictatorships who could easily release fake data to boost their image, but even by taking official data as valid, in 1970 Yugoslavia had $700 GDP per capita while Spain had $1200. Everybody knows the Balkans and Eastern Europe have always been less developed than Spain and Portugal.
One just has to look at the urbanism and architecture of those countries. The difference becomes staggering if we look at christian orthodox countries.