Human Development: Insights, Inequalities, and Global Perspectives on Well-being Enhancement

TOPICS COVERED: #

1. INTRODUCTION
2. GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
3. THE FOUR PILLARS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
4. MEASURING HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
5. INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

Opportunities for Human Development Through Well-being Enhancement #

• Human development can be defined as the process of enhancing people’s freedoms and opportunities and improving their well-being.
• Human development focuses on improving people’s lives rather than assuming that economic growth will lead to greater wellbeing for all.
• Economic growth is seen as a means to development, rather than an end in itself.

GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT #

Meaning of both growth and development changes over a period of time. The difference is that growth is quantitative, whereas development is a qualitative concept. 

Enhancing Human Development: Equity, Productivity, Sustainability, and Empowerment  #

• Equity
• Productivity
• Sustainability
• Empowerment

(table) 

Approaches to Human Development 

(word art)

• Approaches

1. Income
2. Basic Needs
3. Capability
4. Welfare

Human Progress: Understanding the Human Development Index (HDI) #

Human development Index (HDI) #

• Published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on an annual basis, it is a statistical tool used to measure a country’s overall achievement in its social and economic dimensions.
• The social and economic dimensions of a country are based on the health of people, their level of education attainment and their standard of living.
• First report was published in
• The human development approach, developed by the economist Mahbub Ul Haq, is anchored in the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities. It had the purpose “to shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people centered policies”.
• HDI is broken down into four tiers–
• Very high human development
• High human development
• Medium human development
• Low human development
• HDI measures average success of a country in three basic dimensions of human development:
  • A long and healthy life
  • Access to knowledge
  • A decent standard of living

Navigating Inequality: Insights from India’s Human development Index (HDI) 2019 Report  #

• Theme of the Report– “Beyond income, beyond averages, beyond today: Inequalities in human development in the 21st century”
• India’s position:
• India’s rank- 129 out of 189 (Last year’s rank- 130)
• Despite lifting 271 million people out of poverty between 2005-15, India still remains home to 28% (364 million) of the world’s poor.
• Between 1990 and 2018, India’s HDI value increased by 50 per cent (from 0.431 to 0.647), which places it above the average for countries in the medium human development group (0.634) and above the average for other South Asian countries (0.642).
• This means that in the last three decades, life expectancy at birth in India increased by 11.6 years, whereas the average number of schooling years increased by 3.5 years. Per capita incomes increased 250 times.
• India is only marginally better than the South Asian average on the Gender Development Index (0.829 vs 0.828), and ranks at a low 122 (of 162) countries on the 2018 Gender Inequality Index.

The other Key Dimensions of Human Development Indices in 2019 Report  #

• Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI)
• Gender Development Index (GDI)
• Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)
• Gender Inequality Index (GII) and

Inequality- Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) #

• The IHDI shows percentage loss in HDI due to inequality.
• The IHDI combines a country’s average achievements in health, education and income with how those achievements are distributed among a country’s population by “discounting” each dimension’s average value according to its level of inequality.
• Thus, the IHDI is a distribution-sensitive average level of human development. Two countries with different distributions of achievements can have the same average HDI value.
• The HDI can be viewed as an index of ‘potential’ human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality)
• The index does not take into account several factors, such as the net wealth per capita or the relative quality of goods in a country. This situation tends to lower the ranking for some of the most advanced countries, such as the G7 members and others.
• Under perfect equality, the IHDI is equal to the HDI, but falls below the HDI when inequality rises.
• India’s 2020 position dropped by one position to 130 (as compared to the HDI Index 2019- 129) with a score of 0.477. However, the IHDI score has improved from 0.468 in 2018.

The Distinction: IHDI vs. HDI in Human Development Indices #

• The difference between the IHDI and HDI is the human development cost of inequality, also termed – the overall loss to human development due to inequality.
• The IHDI allows a direct link to inequalities in dimensions, it can direct policies towards inequality reduction, and leads to better understanding of inequalities across population and their contribution to the overall human development cost.
• A recent measure of inequality in the HDI, the Coefficient of human inequality, is calculated as an unweighted average of inequality across three dimensions.
• The IHDI is calculated for 150 countries.

Assessing Gender Disparities: Exploring the Gender Development Index (GDI) in Human Development #

• The GDI measures gender gaps in human development achievements by accounting for disparities between women and men in three basic dimensions of human development – health, knowledge and living standards using the same component indicators as in the HDI.
• The GDI shows how much women are lagging behind their male counterparts and how much women need to catch up within each dimension of human development.
• It is useful for understanding the real gender gap in human development achievements and is informative to design policy tools to close the gap.
• India is only marginally better than the South Asian average on the Gender Development Index (0.829 vs 0.828).

Gender Disparities: Exploring the Gender Inequality Index (GII) in Human Development #

• Gender inequality remains a major barrier to human development.
• Girls and women have made major strides since 1990, but they have not yet gained gender equity. The disadvantages facing women and girls are a major source of inequality.
• All too often, women and girls are discriminated against in health, education, political representation, labour market, etc.—with negative consequences for development of their capabilities and their freedom of choice.
• The GII is built on the same framework as the IHDI – to better expose differences in the distribution of achievements between women and men.
• It measures the human development costs of gender inequality. Thus, the higher the GII value the more disparities between females and males and the more loss to human development.
• GII presents a composite measure of gender inequality using three dimensions:
• In GII, India is at 122 out of 162 countries. Neighbors China (39), Sri Lanka (86), Bhutan (99), Myanmar (106) were placed above India.
• Reproductive Health
  • Measured by maternal mortality ratio and adolescent birth rates
• Economic status
  • Expressed as labour market participation and measured by labour force participation rate of female and male populations aged 15 years and older.
• Empowerment measured by proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and proportion of adult females and males aged 25 years and older with at least some secondary education
• The report noted that group-based inequalities persist, especially affecting women and girls and no place in the world has gender equality.
• The report notes that the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030 as per the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG – 5). It forecasts that it may take 202 years to close the gender gap in economic opportunity.
• The report presents a new “Social Norms Index” indicating how prejudices and social beliefs obstruct gender equality, which shows that only 14% of women and 10% of men worldwide have no gender bias.
• The report highlights that new forms of inequalities will manifest in future through climate change and technological transformation which have the potential to deepen existing social and economic fault lines.

Multidimensional Poverty: Insights from the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) #

• Index is developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
• MPI presents both the incidence and intensity of poverty and tracks 101 countries on deprivations across ten indicators in health, education, and standard of living
• MPI captures the multiple deprivations that people in developing countries face in their health, education and standard of living.
• India accounts for 28% of the 1.3 billion multidimensional poor.
• SDG – 1 – Ending poverty in all its forms, everywhere.

Global Gender Gap Index #

• It is published by the World economic forum (WEF) annually.
• It was first published in
• The Index benchmarks 153 countries on their progress towards gender parity in four dimensions:
• The Index aims to track progress on relative gaps between women and men on health, education, economy and politics

Global Gender Gap and Its Implications on Human Development #

• Globally, the average (population-weighted) distance completed to gender parity is at 68.6%, which is an improvement since the last edition. It will take 99.5 years to achieve full parity between men and women at the current rate of change.
• The largest gender disparity is in political empowerment. Only 25% of the 35,127 seats in parliaments around the world are occupied by women, and only 21% of the 3,343 ministers are women.
• Iceland has been the frontrunner on the Global Gender Gap Index for 11 years in a row. It has closed almost 88% of its gender gap, followed by Nordic neighbors Norway, Finland and Sweden.
• Yemen is ranked the worst (153rd), while Iraq is 152nd and Pakistan 151st.

Gender Disparities in India: Impact on Human Development #

• India has slipped to the 112th spot from its 108th position in the last edition.
• India has been ranked below countries like China (106th), Sri Lanka (102nd), Nepal (101st), Brazil (92nd), Indonesia (85th) and Bangladesh (50th).
• Performance on Four Indicators: India has improved to 18th place on political empowerment but it has slipped to 150th on health and survival, to 149th in terms of economic participation and opportunity and to 112th place for educational attainment.
• Economic
• Among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap (0.354) is larger than the political gender gap (0.411).
• India is among the countries with very low women representation on company boards (13.8%), while it was even worse in China (9.7%).
• On health and survival, four large countries -Pakistan, India, Vietnam and China – fare badly with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.

Human Capital Index: A Benchmark for Future Generations #

• The HCI has been constructed for 157 countries.
• It claims to seek to measure the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect to attain by age 18.
• The HCI index values are contended to convey the productivity of the next generation of workers, compared to a benchmark of complete standard education and full health.
• The HCI has three components:

International Comparisons of Human Development Index (HDI) #

Fig: International Comparison

India’s neighbors in Human Development Index (HDI)-2019 #

Sri Lanka (71) and China (85), Bhutan (134), Bangladesh (135), Myanmar (145), Nepal (147), Pakistan (152) and Afghanistan (170).

Fig: India’s neighbors in HDI-2019

Global Human Development Index (HDI) Rankings 2019 #

• Norway, Switzerland, Ireland placed at the top three positions in that order.
• Globally, there are 3 billion poor people.
• Around 661 million of these poor people live in Asia and the Pacific.
• South Asia constitutes 41% of the world’s poor.