Shaping human development: Which way next?

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 20, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 743-751

  Sagar, Ambuj D ^a   Najam, Adil ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEVELOPMENT THEORY; UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM;

EID: 0032709178     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436599913532     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p 1.
2. As Desai points out, while questions about the sufficiency (and even the desirability) of economic growth were being asked in the 1960s, the relatively high growth rates enjoyed in many parts of the South in the 1970s sidelined this discussion. The economic problems faced in the 1980s by much of the South, especially Latin America and Africa, revived the debate on the role of factors other than growth in development. He also explicitly mentions that it is from the literature on 'inequality and poverty and especially the notion of capabilities that the concept of human development traces one of its strongest roots'. See M Desai, 'Human development: concepts and measurement', European Economic Review, 35, 1991, pp 350-357.
3. UNDP, Human Development Report, 1990, p 10 (emphasis added).
4. In the current version of the HDR, adult literacy and combined enrolment ratios represent the educational attainment indicator, life expectancy at birth the longevity indicator, and utility-adjusted real GDP per capita the standard of living indicator.
5. Here we refer to the pithy definition of the this term: 'UNese - a statement that appeals to all, appears profound at first sight, but on careful dissection is meaningless'. M Hopkins, 'Human development revisited: a new UNDP report', World Development, 19(10), 1991, pp 1469-1473.
6. In a sense, the vigorous nature of this debate, catalysed by the launch of these reports, can itself be thought of as a contribution to the development discussion.
7. See the detailed review in the 1993 Human Development Report.
8. For example there have been some adjustments to the calculation of the Human Development Index over time the most important of these coming in the second report in 1991. For the knowledge dimension, the initial choice of indicator was limited to adult literacy; HDR 1991 combined this with mean years of schooling (giving 2/3 weight to the former and 1/3 to the latter). For the standard-of-living dimension the initial report used the logarithm of (purchasing-power-parity adjusted) income for the calculation, with a zero weight being given to income above the average poverty line of a selected set of industrialised countries A less drastic utility adjustment was applied in HDR 1991, utilising the Atkinson adjustment formula for taking into account diminishing returns of higher incomes (based on PPP-adjusted GDP per capita) The principal method of calculating the index, however, has remained largely unchanged since the 1991 report; the changes since then have been more in terms of fine-tuning the composite indices rather than conceptual advances in the original design of the measure.
9. M McGillivray, 'The Human Development Index: yet another redundant composite development indicator', World Development, 19(10), 1991, pp 1461-1468; and H Trabold-Nübler, 'The Human Development Index - a new development indicator', Intereconomics, 26(5), 1991, pp 236-243.
10. M McGillivray, 'The Human Development Index: yet another redundant composite development indicator', World Development, 19(10), 1991, pp 1461-1468; and H Trabold-Nübler, 'The Human Development Index - a new development indicator', Intereconomics, 26(5), 1991, pp 236-243.
11. T N Srinivasan, 'Human development: a new paradigm or reinvention of the wheel?', American Economic Review: AEA Papers and Proceedings, 84(2), 1994, pp 238-243.
12. Trabold-Nübler, 'The Human Development Index'; and G Lüchters & L Menkhoft, 'Human development as statistical artifact', World Development, 24(8), 1996, pp 1385-1392.
13. Trabold-Nübler, 'The Human Development Index'; and G Lüchters & L Menkhoft, 'Human development as statistical artifact', World Development, 24(8), 1996, pp 1385-1392.
14. Desai, 'Human development', p 356.
15. A D Sagar & A Najam, 'The Human Development Index: a critical review', Ecological Economics, 23(4), 1998, pp 249-264; M Ravallion, 'Good and bad growth: the Human Development Reports', World Development, 25(5), 1997, pp 631-638.
16. A D Sagar & A Najam, 'The Human Development Index: a critical review', Ecological Economics, 23(4), 1998, pp 249-264; M Ravallion, 'Good and bad growth: the Human Development Reports', World Development, 25(5), 1997, pp 631-638.
17. McGillivray, 'The Human Development Index.
18. Srinivasan, 'Human development'.
19. Sagar & Najam, 'The Human Development Index'.
20. Ravallion, 'Good and bad growth'.
21. UNDP, Human Development Report, 1998.
22. World Bank, World Development Report 1998: Knowledge for Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, p 2.
23. The recent financial crisis in Asia illustrates quite clearly the linkages between the international political economy and national human development.
24. The first HDR (1990) mentioned that human development has two sides - the formation of human capabilities and the use people make of their acquired capabilities. The latter point, unfortunately, has not really been explored in any of the reports.
25. The recognition of humans not simply as individual entities but as part of different communities needs to be highlighted as an integral part of human development. The recent surge of writing on 'social capital' reflects the importance of the inseparability of the individual from his/her social context and the positive impacts of such linkages on dimensions of human development. See A Portes, 'Social capital: its origins and applications in modern sociology', Annual Reviews of Sociology, 24, 1998, pp 1-24; and World Bank, www.worldbank.org/poverty/scapital.
26. V V B Rao, 'Human Development Report 1990: review and assessment', World Development 19(10), 1991, pp 1451-1460.
27. Once again, the first report mentioned the importance of issues ranging from political, economic and social freedom to personal self-respect and guaranteed human rights, but these have more or less remained buried in the pages of the first report.
28. R Chambers, 'Responsible well-being - a personal agenda for development', World Development, 25(11), 1997, pp 1743-1754.
29. UNDP, Human Development Report, 1990, p 1.
30. Chambers, 'Responsible well-being'.
31. Consider, for example, that the 1998 Human Development Report presents the average HDI for the world as 0.772 (where the lowest HDI for any nation is 0.185 and the highest is 0.960), which is about the same as the HDIS of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. This does not match up with a world where, according to the 1998 report, 20% of the world's people in the highest income countries account for 86% of total private consumption and the poorest 20% a mere 1.3%, or where the bottom 20% survive on less than the equivalent of one dollar a day, and where over 45% of the world's people do not have basic sanitation.
32. UNDP, Human Development Report, 1990, p 12.
33. At the same time, gender-related indices - the GDI (Gender Related Development Index) and the GEM (Gendered Empowerment Measure) (which themselves have an equity dimension) have become a regular feature of the HDRS. A recent effort to develop an education-disparity corrected index has been presented in the literature recently by D A Hicks, 'The inequality-adjusted human development index: a constructive proposal', World Development, 25(8), 1997, pp 1283-1298. This suggests that incorporating equity issues into the HDI, while difficult, is not impossible.
34. The poorest in most least-developed countries will be at or only slightly above the minimum thresholds defined for income, namely, PPP$100 and 0% for literacy and enrolment. Only in the case of life expectancy may they do better than the minimum of 25 years.
35. The Human Poverty Index now included as an annex to the reports estimates the fraction of the population that is deprived on the dimensions of human development. Our suggestion is complementary to this in that it focuses on the state of the poorest.
36. With availability of detailed data, it may be possible to develop an understanding of the kinds of citizens that comprise the most deprived group on each dimension for each country.