Costa Rica shows steady overall improvement in human development, with increasing educational opportunities and income rates, but with nagging concerns over gender equity and growing economic inequality.

This was revealed in the latest Human Development Index (HDI) published this week by the United Nations Development Program.

Costa Rica is currently situated in 9th place in human development in the Latin America and Caribbean region.

Globally it is ranked 66th out of the 188 countries included in the study.

Norway occupies first place, and the Central African Republic occupies last position in the index, which has been calculated since 2010.

According to this most recent study, Chile, ranks first in the region, and is followed by Argentina, Barbados, Uruguay, Bahamas, Panama, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, and Costa Rica (for the second highest rank in Central America).

The UNDP looks at a number of factors to measure how well residents live a long and healthy life, the education they receive, and their standard of living.

Kryssia Brade, assistant representative of the United Nations Development Program, said in the Latin America and Caribbean region, only two of the countries included in the study have reach the category of “very high human development”: Chile and Argentina. Costa Rica is considered by the UN agency to have a “high level” of human development.

The UN agency said countries’ positions this year can not be compared with those of previous years because of changes made to the methods used and updates to the data.

These latest rankings (2016) were calculated with data from 2015, the most recent complete data.