Human development is about human freedoms. It is about building human capabilities — not just for a few, not even foremost, but for everyone. The greatest innovations in measuring human development have been new measurement tools — notably the Human Development Index (HDI) published by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The principle underlying HDI, considered path-breaking in 1990, was elegantly simple: National development should be measured not only by income per capita, as had long been the practice, but also by health and education achievements. Ranking countries by HDI value transformed the development discourse and dethroned income per capita as the sole indicator of development progress.
The recently published Human Development Report 2018 presents HDI values for 189countries and territories with the most recent data for 2017. Of these countries, 59 are in the very high human development group, 53 in the high, 39 in the medium and only 38 are in the low.
Looking back over almost three decades, all regions and human development groups have made substantial progress. The global HDI value in 2017 was 0.728, up about 21.7 per cent from 0.598 in 1990.
Across the world, people are living longer, are more educated and have greater livelihood opportunities. The average lifespan is seven years longer than it was in 1990, and more than 130 countries have universal enrolment in primary education.
Although HDI values have been rising across regions and human development groups, the rates vary significantly. South Asia was the fastest growing region over 1990–2017, at 45.3 per cent, followed by East Asia and the Pacific at 41.8 per cent and sub-Saharan Africa at 34.9 per cent. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, by contrast, grew by 14 per cent. The trends hold promise for reducing gaps in human development across regions.
But HDI growth has slowed across regions, particularly over the last decade. Part of the reason lies in the 2008–2009 global food, financial and economic crises. But part is simply that as humans progress, slower HDI growth is inevitable, given that growth ceilings of different components of the HDI — as seen with OECD countries.
There is a biological limit to life expectancy, and years of schooling and rates of enrolment cannot grow indefinitely. Income is the only component of HDI that could continue to grow; but even income growth slows as economies mature. As more countries reach upper limits of HDI dimensions, measures of equality of human development become more central.
Progress has not always been steady since 1990. Some countries suffered reversals owing to conflicts, epidemics or economic crises. For example, many countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia saw their HDI values fall in the 1990s owing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and to military conflict, hyperinflation and a painful introduction (or expansion) of market mechanisms.
Sub-Saharan Africa also had losses in the 1990s, when conflict and the HIV/AIDS epidemic caused life expectancy to drop dramatically. Despite these challenges, countries in these regions recovered their losses on the HDI and grew over the last two decades. For example, Sub-Saharan Africa went from the second slowest growing region on the HDI in the 1990s to the fastest growing between 2000 and 2010.
In recent years other countries had setbacks as new challenges emerged and conflicts erupted. Between 2012 and 2017 Libya, the Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen had falling HDI values and ranks — the direct effect of violent conflict.
In 2012 the Syrian Arab Republic ranked 128 on the HDI, in the medium human development group. But after years of conflict it dropped to 155 in 2017, in the low human development group, due mainly to lower life expectancy.
In sum, there have been significant advances in human development over the past few decades, especially in low human development countries, up 46.6 per cent on the HDI since 1990. But some countries have suffered serious setbacks — sometimes erasing in a few years the gains of several decades.
The gaps in human development across countries, while narrowing, remain huge and there is still a long way to go for holistic human development across the globe.
The writer is an economist