Based on the study of areas, content and character of the activities of the leading subjects of the human development, the imperatives of its international regulation in the provision of social safety were synthesized. The share and value of these imperatives is strengthened by the general recognition of necessity of principal changes in the formation of the world social and economical policy and building of the society with the expanded capabilities for the self-fulfillment of an educated, healthy and materially secured person. The world system of indicators of the human development index is based on the methodological recognition of the leading importance of the level and quality of life in the formation of a system for assessement of the state of human development and includes the three leading aspects of human life - material standards of life, education level and state of health. For a long time such a system yielded positive results, where the main thing was the comparison of the world’s countries with the determined indicators.
The scientific discussions in existing literature focusing on sustainable development are vast. The broad focus of sustainable development has raised the need to develop indicators which allow measuring the progress towards sustainability and evaluating policies intended to support sustainability. This research aims to analyse and determine the relationship between the Human Development Index (HDI) and some of the sustainable development indicators partly comprised in the Sustainable Society Index (SS1). Using data for the period of 2001-2010 from selected eleven EU countries, the goal of this paper to shed some light on the main shortages of the HDI as a measure of sustainable development. The findings of this research show that in most cases the HDI ignores sustainable development indicators, making it a partly fit measure and that there are no cases where the HDI can be described as an absolutely correct measure of sustainable development.