The first HDR was launched in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. Since then reports have been released most years, and have explored different themes through the human development approach, which places people at the center of the development process.
The reports are ensured of editorial independence by the United Nations General Assembly. They are seen as reports to UNDP, not of UNDP. This allows each report greater freedom to explore ideas and constructively challenge policies. Each report also presents an updated set of indices, including the Human Development Index (HDI), which is a measure of average achievement in the basic dimensions of human development across countries, and a compendium of key development statistics relevant to the report theme.
The Human Development Reports have an extensive influence on the development debate worldwide. They have also inspired national and regional analyses which, by their nature, usually address issues that are more country – or regionally – specific.
History
The report was first launched in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.[2] Its goal was to place people at the center of the development process in terms of economic debate, policy and advocacy. Development was characterized by the provision of choices and freedoms resulting in widespread outcomes.
"People are the real wealth of a nation," Haq wrote in the opening lines of the first report in 1990. "The basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. This may appear to be a simple truth. But it is often forgotten in the immediate concern with the accumulation of commodities and financial wealth."
The United Nations General Assembly has formally recognized the Report as "an independent intellectual exercise" and "an important tool for raising awareness about human development around the world."
The Human Development Report is an independent report, commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and is the product of a selected team of leading scholars, development practitioners and members of the Human Development Report Office of UNDP. It is a report independent of the Administrator of the UNDP, as suggested by Mahbub ul Haq.[3] It is translated into numerous languages and launched in more than 100 countries annually.[2]
Since 1990, more than 140 countries have published some 600 national Human Development Reports, with UNDP support. UNDP has also sponsored scores of regional reports, such as the ten-volume Arab Human Development Report series, which have made internationally recognized contributions to the global dialogue on democracy, women's rights, inequality, poverty eradication and other critical issues.
The 2010 Human Development Report's review of human development trends showed that most developing countries made dramatic yet often underestimated progress in health, education and basic living standards since 1970 with many of the poorest countries posting the greatest gains.
In the 2010 Report, the Sultanate of Oman was reported to be the most improved country in the past 40 years out of the 135 countries assessed (the report reported on improvement in the period 1970–2010). Oman's strides in education, women empowerment and health care under the patronage of the current Sultan of Oman led to it securing the 1st position.
The 2009 Human Development Report, Overcoming Barriers, focused on migration – both within and beyond borders. It was chosen because it is a prominent theme in domestic and international debates. Its starting point is that the global distribution of capabilities is extraordinarily unequal, and that this is a major driver for movement of people.
2010 Human Development Report
The 2010 Human Development Report—The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development—showed through a detailed new analysis of long-term Human Development Index (HDI) trends that most developing countries made dramatic yet often underestimated progress in health, education and basic living standards in recent decades, with many of the poorest countries posting the greatest gains.
Yet patterns of achievement vary greatly, with some countries losing ground since 1970, the 2010 Human Development Report shows. Introducing three new indices,[4] the 20th anniversary edition of the report[5] documented wide inequalities within and among countries, deep disparities between women and men[6] on a wide range of development indicators,[7] and the prevalence of extreme multidimensional poverty[8] in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The new report also included a change in the methodology used to calculate the indexes using better statistical methods, as well as new parameters for judging the growth and development.
The first Human Development Report[9] introduced its pioneering HDI[10] and analyzed previous decades of development indicators, concluding that "there is no automatic link between economic growth and human progress." The 2010 Report's[11] rigorous review of longer-term trends—looking back at HDI indicators[12] for most countries from 1970—showed there is no consistent correlation between national economic performance and achievement in the non-income HDI areas of health and education.
Overall, as shown in the Report's analysis of all countries for which complete HDI data[12] are available for the past 40 years, life expectancy climbed from 59 years in 1970 to 70 in 2010, school enrollment rose from just 55 percent of all primary and secondary school-age children to 70 percent, and per capita GDP doubled to more than US$10,000. People in all regions shared in this progress, though to varying degrees. Life expectancy, for example, rose by 18 years in the Arab states between 1970 and 2010, compared to eight years in sub-Saharan Africa. The 135 countries studied include 92 percent of the world's population.
The "Top 10 Movers" highlighted in the 2010 Report—those countries among the 135 that improved most in HDI terms over the past 40 years—were led by Oman, which invested energy earnings over the decades in education and public health.
The other nine "Top Movers" are China, Nepal, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Laos, Tunisia, South Korea, Algeria and Morocco. Remarkably, China was the only country that made the "Top 10" list due solely to income performance; the main drivers of HDI achievement were in health and education. The next 10 leaders in HDI improvement over the past 40 years include several low-income but high HID-achieving countries "not typically described as success stories," the Report notes, among them Ethiopia (#11), Cambodia (#15) and Benin (#18)—all of which made big gains in education and public health.
The 2010 Human Development Report continued the HDI tradition[13] of measurement innovation by introducing new indices that address crucial development factors not directly reflected in the HDI:
The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI):[14] The 2010 Report examined HDI data through the lens of inequality, adjusting HDI achievements to reflect disparities in income, health and education.
The Gender Inequality Index (GII): The 2010 Report introduced a new measure of gender inequities, including maternal mortality rates and women's representation in parliaments. The GII calculated national HDI losses from gender inequities, from the Netherlands (the most equal in GII terms) to Yemen (the least).
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI): The 2010 Report featured a new multidimensional poverty measure that complements income-based poverty assessments by looking at multiple factors at the household level, from basic living standards to access to schooling, clean water and health care. About 1.7 billion people—fully a third of the population in the 104 countries included in the MPI—are estimated to live in multidimensional poverty, more than the estimated 1.3 billion who live on $1.25 a day or less.
2020 Human Development Report
The 2020 report asserts that immense human pressures on the planet have ushered in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, or the Age of Humans. As such, the report introduces a new index to account for these pressures, the Planetary-Pressures Adjusted Human Development Index (PHDI), which includes a country's carbon dioxide emissions and material footprint. In his foreword to the report, UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said that "humans wield more power over the planet than ever before. In the wake of COVID-19, record-breaking temperatures and spiraling inequality, it is time to use that power to redefine what we mean by progress, where our carbon and consumption footprints are no longer hidden."[15]
Numerous highly developed wealthy countries plummet as a result of their environmental impact, such as the United States, which drops 45 places. By contrast, countries with lighter footprints such Costa Rica, Moldova and Panama move up the index by roughly 30 places.[15][16]
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores a higher level of HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the gross national income GNI (PPP) per capita is higher. It was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq and was further used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Human Development Report Office.
The capability approach is a normative approach to human welfare that concentrates on the actual capability of persons to achieve lives they value rather than solely having a right or freedom to do so. It was conceived in the 1980s as an alternative approach to welfare economics.
The Human Poverty Index (HPI) was an indication of the poverty of community in a country, developed by the United Nations to complement the Human Development Index (HDI) and was first reported as part of the Human Development Report in 1997. It is developed by United Nations Development Program which also publishes indexes like HDI It was considered to better reflect the extent of deprivation in deprived countries compared to the HDI. In 2010, it was supplanted by the UN's Multidimensional Poverty Index.
The Gender Development Index (GDI) is an index designed to measure gender equality.
The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) is an index designed to measure gender equality. GEM is the United Nations Development Programme's attempt to measure the extent of gender inequality across the globe's countries, based on estimates of women's relative economic income, participation in high-paying positions with economic power, and access to professional and parliamentary positions. It was introduced at the same time as the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) but measures topics like empowerment that are not covered by that index. Since it was first adopted, the GEM has been employed in several academic studies related to empowerment as a reliable metric for comparing gender empowerment across different countries. It has also faced some harsh criticisms, and many alterations and alternatives have been proposed.
All ethnic groups in Sri Lanka have clear distinctions regarding the roles of the sexes. Sri Lanka was the first nation in the world to elect a female head of government, Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Bandaranaike won the election in 1960 after S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the preceding leader who was also her husband, was murdered by a spy.
Human development involves studies of the human condition with its core being the capability approach. The inequality adjusted Human Development Index is used as a way of measuring actual progress in human development by the United Nations. It is an alternative approach to a single focus on economic growth, and focused more on social justice, as a way of understanding progress
Multidimensional Poverty Indices use a range of indicators to calculate a summary poverty figure for a given population, in which a larger figure indicates a higher level of poverty. This figure considers both the proportion of the population that is deemed poor, and the 'breadth' of poverty experienced by these 'poor' households, following the Alkire & Foster 'counting method'. The method was developed following increased criticism of monetary and consumption based poverty measures, seeking to capture the deprivations in non-monetary factors that contribute towards well-being. While there is a standard set of indicators, dimensions, cutoffs and thresholds used for a 'Global MPI', the method is flexible and there are many examples of poverty studies that modify it to best suit their environment. The methodology has been mainly, but not exclusively, applied to developing countries.
The Gender Inequality Index (GII) is an index for the measurement of gender disparity that was introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report 20th anniversary edition by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). According to the UNDP, this index is a composite measure to quantify the loss of achievement within a country due to gender inequality. It uses three dimensions to measure opportunity cost: reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation. The new index was introduced as an experimental measure to remedy the shortcomings of the previous indicators, the Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), both of which were introduced in the 1995 Human Development Report.
Measures of gender equality or inequality are statistical tools employed to quantify the concept of gender equality.
References
↑ "Reports and Publications". Human Development Reports | United Nations Development Programme. Retrieved 22 September 2013.
↑ Weiss, Thomas G. (20 July 2005). "Transcript of Interview of Richard Jolly"(PDF). United Nations Intellectual History Project. Transcribed by Ron Nerio. Unhistory.org. Retrieved 22 September 2013.
↑ "Media". Human Development Reports | United Nations Development Programme. Archived from the original on 16 November 2013. Retrieved 7 November 2013.
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![The world map representing Human Development Index categories (based on 2022 data, published in 2024)
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