United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has recently published the 20th Anniversary edition of its Human Development Report (HDR) which presents the latest Human Development Index (HDI). The premise of the HDI reports is simple - national development should be measured not simply by national income nor should an individual’s well-being be evaluated by money alone, as had long been the practice, but also by life expectancy and literacy.
Income is of course crucial - without resources, any progress is difficult. Yet there is a need to gauge whether people can lead long and healthy lives, whether they have the opportunity to be educated and whether they are free to use their knowledge and talents to shape their own destinies.
A critique of the HDIs so far has been its reliance on national averages, which concealed skewed distribution, and the absence of a quantitative measure of human freedom. The current HDR presents an opportunity to review human development achievements and challenges systematically at both the global and national levels—a task not attempted since the first report — and to analyse their implications for policy and future research.
The present HDR continues with the tradition of measurement of innovation while introducing three new measures —capturing multidimensional inequality, gender disparities and extreme deprivation. The Inequality-adjusted HDI, Gender Inequality Index and Multidimensional Poverty Index, building on innovations in the field and advances in theory and data, are applied to most countries in the world and provide important new insights.
The HDI trend analysis 1970-2010 broadly indicates the following:
- In some basic respects the world is a much better place today than it was in 1990 - or in 1970. Over the past 20 years many people around the world have experienced dramatic improvements in key aspects of their lives. Overall, they are healthier, more educated and wealthier and have more power to appoint and hold their leaders accountable than ever before.
- There has been an increase in the measure of development — the Human Development Index (HDI), which combines information on life expectancy, schooling and income in a simple composite measure. The world’s average HDI has increased 18 percent since 1990 (and 41 percent since 1970), reflecting large aggregate improvements in life expectancy, school enrolment, literacy and income. But there has also been considerable variability in experience and much volatility. The aggregate global measures are strongly influenced by the most populous countries — China and India.
- Almost all countries have benefited from this progress. Of 135 countries in the sample for 1970–2010, with 92 percent of the world’s people, only 3—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and Zimbabwe - have a lower HDI today than in 1970.
- Overall, poor countries are catching up with rich countries on the HDI. This convergence paints a far more optimistic picture than a perspective limited to trends in income, where divergence has continued. But not all countries have seen rapid progress, and the variations are striking. Those experiencing the slowest progress are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa struck by the HIV epidemic and countries in the former Soviet Union suffering increased adult mortality.
- Fastest progress in human development comes in different ways: top movers in HDI, non income HDI and GDP during 1970–2010. The top HDI movers (countries that have made the greatest progress in improving the HDI) include well known income “growth miracles” such as China, Indonesia and South Korea. But they include others too — such as Nepal, Oman and Tunisia — where progress in the non-income dimensions of human development has been equally remarkable. It is striking that the top 10 list contains several countries not typically described as top performers. And Ethiopia comes in 11th, with three other Sub-Saharan African countries (Botswana, Benin and Burkina Faso) in the top 25. Thus, the broader human development perspective reveals that progress in health and education can drive success in human development — in fact, 7 countries enter the top 10 list, thanks to their high achievements in health and education, in some cases even with unexceptional growth.
- Not all countries have progressed rapidly, and the variation is striking. Over the past 40 years, a quarter of developing countries saw their HDI increase less than 20 percent, another quarter, more than 65 percent.
- These differences partly reflect different starting points — less developed countries have on average faster progress in health and education than more developed ones do. But half the variation in HDI performance is unexplained by initial HDI, and countries with similar starting points experience remarkably different evolutions, suggesting that country factors such as policies, institutions and geography are important.
- Health advances have been large but are slowing. The slowdown in aggregate progress is due largely to dramatic reversals in 19 countries. In nine of them — six in Sub-Saharan Africa and three in the former Soviet Union — life expectancy has fallen below 1970 levels.
- Progress in education has been substantial and widespread, reflecting not only improvements in the quantity of schooling but also in the equity of access to education for girls and boys. To a large extent this progress reflects greater state involvement, which is often characterized more by getting children into school than by imparting a high-quality education.
- Progress in income varies much more. Despite aggregate progress, there is no convergence in income — in contrast to health and education — because on average rich countries have grown faster than poor ones over the past 40 years. The divide between developed and developing countries persists: a small subset of countries has remained at the top of the world income distribution, and only a handful of countries that started out poor have joined that high-income group.
- Economic growth has been extremely unequal—both in countries experiencing fast growth and in groups benefiting from national progress. And the gaps in human development across the world, while narrowing, still remain huge.
India's Human Development status
- India ranks 119 in HDI and has moved up one position since 2005. This despite the fact that it ranks tenth in improvements in income.
- Eight Indian states, with poverty as acute as the 26 poorest African countries, are home to 421 million multi-dimensionally poor people, more than the 410 million people living in those African countries combined.
- Delhi’s rate of multidimensional poverty (MPI) is close to Iraq’s and VietNam’s (about 14 percent), while the state of Bihar's poverty is similar to Sierra Leone and Guinea (about 81 percent).
- 81 percent of people of Scheduled Tribes are multidimensionally poor, alongside 66 percent of those of Scheduled Castes and 58 percent of those of Other Backward Castes. About a third of other Indian households are multidimensionally poor, with an MPI just below that of Honduras.
The future HDRs will have to grapple with even more difficult issues, including the increasingly critical area of sustainability, as well as inequality and broader notions of empowerment.
Download the report here: