The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. Synthesis > novelty in a big new UN report.

Of the big reports that spew forth from the multilateral system, some break new ground in terms of research or narratives, while others usefully recap the latest thinking on a given issue. Last week’s 2013 Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, falls into the latter category, pulling together the evidence for a tectonic North-South shift in global economic and political affairs, summarizing new thinking on inequality, South in the North etc and asking what happens next. If you’re currently sunk in the depths of Europessimism or US political stalemate, you may find such an upbeat story refreshing (or even disturbing). You can read the exec sum online, but it doesn’t seem to allow you to cut and paste (v annoying for lazy bloggers like me).

Some useful numbers to demonstrate the extent of the shift: From 1980 to now, developing countries’ share of global GDP rose from 33% to 45%, their share of world goods trade from 25% to 45%, and South-South trade as a % of the world total rose from 8% to 26%.

How has this happened and so what? The HDR’s approach is to learn from the success of 18 of the more than 40 countries in the developing world that have done better than expected in human development terms in recent decades, with their progress accelerating markedly over the past ten years. Not just China and India, but countries like Turkey, Ghana and Mauritius. Again, nothing new there – the Growth Commission had a go at that five years back – but still infinitely preferable to maths-led regression-tastic nonsense that ignores history and politics.

Compared to the Growth Commission, the HDR’s conclusions are more interventionist, and more political. The Report identifies 3 main drivers shared across the success stories:

1. A proactive developmental state

2. Tapping into global markets

3. Determined social policy innovation

On the role of the state, successful countries ‘share some key characteristics. Most were proactive “developmental states” that sought to take strategic advantage of opportunities offered by world trade. They also invested heavily in human capital through health and education programs and other essential social services. More important than getting prices right, a developmental state must get policy priorities right. They should be people-centred, promoting opportunities while protecting against downside risks.’

In case you missed it, that’s a not-very-subtle two fingers to the Washington Consensus and its preference for ‘getting the prices right’.

Oops, wrong South

The report points to some downside risks that threaten this progress: ‘short-sighted austerity measures, failures to address persistent inequalities, and a lack of opportunities for meaningful civic participation.’ But overall, as the South rises, the focus will shift to ‘long-term challenges shared by industrialized countries of the North’ – both commonly shared issues like ageing and jobs, and collective action problems like climate change.

Its recommendations for continuing this amazing progress include

1. Developing countries need to move their focus from ‘growth first’ to human development

2. Enhanced South-South learning and integration

3. Greater representation for civil society and the South in the international system. Global institutions have not yet caught up with this historic change (the international system’s loss rather than the BRICS’). China, with the world’s second largest economy and biggest foreign exchange reserves, has but a 3.3 percent share in the World Bank, less than France’s 4.3 percent. India, which will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous country, does not have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And Africa, with a billion people in 54 sovereign nations, is under-represented in almost all international institutions.

And in a nice table-turning touch, the report ‘urges the convening of a new “South Commission” where developing countries can take the lead in suggesting constructive new approaches to effective global governance.’

Nothing earth-shattering, but a useful exercise in synthesizing the evolving understanding of development and repositioning the multilaterals within it. So what have I missed?

And here’s the rather frenetic animated version

Arab Spring v Muslim Tigers: what’s the connection between human development and revolution?

Just before the Arab Spring kicked off in early 2011, I was happily linking to some really interesting work by Dani Rodrik (one of my development heroes) on ‘muslim tigers’, pointing out that in terms of human development, the top 10 performers since 1970 were not the usual suspects (East Asia, Nordics) but Muslim countries – Oman, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria all featured.

So did the Arab Spring happen in spite of or because of such amazing progress? A new paper from Randall Kuhn of the University of Denver (right, without the hat) explores just that question and comes up with some intriguing hypotheses. Tigerishness in these countries is largely confined to childhood, which then gives way to:

‘“waithood” – the long and precarious path to adulthood facing Arab youth. Potential consequences of youth exclusion include lost productivity, social anomie, atrophying skills, and of course civil unrest. But these particular crises did not occur in a vacuum. While the Arab States experienced the same global economic recession as other nations, the specific crises were conditioned by decades of progress in basic human development.’

The most interesting aspect of this ‘waithood’ is the interaction between the labour market and the ‘marriage market’, which partly as a result of improved education has seen a ‘rapid transformation towards delayed marriage and high marriage costs.’ Female age at first marriage rose from 20.8 in 1966 to 29.2 in 2001 for Tunisia, and from 18.7 in 1973 to 31 in 2007 for Libya, and the changes have been similar for all women (rural and urban, more and less educated). In Egypt, the cost of marriage in 2005 was close to $7,000, or about 11 times annual household expenditure. As a result ‘an increasing number of women were accepting long engagements or delaying marriage in order to earn money to pay for the marriage or to wait for a better match.’ Oh, and by the way, ‘Unlike western countries, premarital sex does not have wide social acceptance.’

The result is a pressure cooker of expectations and frustrations. Young educated people unable to find jobs, seeing the status and fulfilment of marriage and parenthood receding into the far horizons the other side of ‘waithood’. And sex, drugs and rock and roll, which at least provide a temporary outlet for my kids’ generation in the UK, were not really on the menu.

Final word to Randall Kuhn:

‘No developing region had seen such improvements in multiple indicators of human development, reflected in declining child mortality, increased schooling, and increased stature of women. This progress permeated widely throughout most populations and sub-populations. Advances in human development contributed to a fundamental reordering of the relationship between citizen and state. Human development fostered a set of higher expectations, both physiologically and socially determined, that placed considerable pressure on governments, particularly in the context of extended adolescence. As the bond between citizen and state frayed, a new generation of political protest movement emerged, facilitated by the rise of information technologies. In addition to material grievances, the wave of protest reflected a collective sense, emerging throughout the Arab world, that citizens could expect more from their governments, including a right to self-determination. If human development does indeed shape the path to revolution, we may hope that it will also determine the ultimate success of the Arab Spring, which remains a work in progress.’

I’m told that Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa team are heartily sick of reading what they call ‘Western narratives’ about the Arab Spring. Is this just another one of those or something more interesting? For the moment (until someone puts me straight), I go with ‘interesting’.

How important is growth to improvements in health and education? Not at all, says a new UN paper

The first batch of background papers to this year’s big Human Development Report has just been published. The one that caught my eye is by George Gray Molina and Mark Purser. “Human Development Trends since 1970: A Social Convergence Story” crunches a big dataset of Human Development Indicator (HDI) numbers and comes up with some pretty heretical conclusions. It finds that that the links between economic growth and improvements in health, education and life expectancy are not nearly as clear as people often assume (in fact the correlation between economic growth and changes in the non-income components of human development over their period of study is nearly zero). So there’s more to life (and development) than growth – like state action, for example. Here’s the highlights:

“We consider whether trends in human development are different from trends in economic growth. To answer these questions, we assemble a 111 country data set from 1970 to 2005 that makes HDI changes comparable both within and between countries.”

Findings: “There is evidence of poorer countries catching-up with rich countries, particularly with respect to life-expectancy and literacy. In addition, we find that the income and non-income components of HDI change are uncorrelated, thus undermining the common view that they occur jointly.

Only one country (Zambia) experiences a reversal in its human development level over the 35-year period; 110 countries experience advances. Achievements are faster for the pre- 1990 period, and are faster in Asia and the Middle East throughout the whole period. Progress on HDI achievements tends to be literacy-led, while progress in Asia tends to be life-expectancy-led. Improvements in Latin America and Eastern Europe are mixed. These results contrast with the conventional portrait of development progress, largely inferred from the economic growth literature.

We also contrast the top 10 performers in HDI with the top 10 performers for GDP per capita. The exercise highlights the differences between growth-led and HDI-led development. The most rapid improvements in life expectancy and literacy are not occurring in the fastest growing economies of the world. They are occurring in a subset of lower and middle income countries in Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa.

Three results emerge from the second part of the paper, focusing on determinants of HDI trends. First, we find evidence of convergence of human development over time. Does “income matter” as a driver of human development? We find that income is not a significant predictor of life expectancy… the drivers of improvements in health and education differ from the forces that lead to income growth.

Although correlated, we do not find evidence to suggest that human development trends can be explained by factors associated with economic growth…. social factors seem to be driving the aggregate human development story.”

I must admit, I’m a bit baffled by this, given the big literature that says growth is crucial to poverty reduction, and poverty reduction to improvements in health and education – anyone care to try and explain the discrepancy?

[update: seems like I missed another very important finding from the paper - 'changes in gender roles --proxied by female literacy and fertility-- are the best predictors of accelerations in life expectancy and literacy achievement' See comments from John Magrath and George Gray Molina]

Other background papers in this batch are:

Human Development Concepts

• Alkire, Sabina, “Human Development: Definitions, Critiques, and Related Concepts”

• Neumayer, Eric, “Human Development and Sustainability”

HD Data and Trends

• Pineda, José and Francisco Rodríguez, “Curse or Blessing? Natural Resources and Human Development”

HD and Governance

• Pritchett, Lant, “Birth Satisfaction Units (BSU): Measuring Cross-National Differences in Human Well-Being”

• Jayadev, Arjun, “Global Governance and Human Development: Promoting Democratic Accountability and Institutional Experimentation”

• Walton, Michael, “Capitalism, the state, and the underlying drivers of human development”

HD in Europe

• Stewart, Kitty, “Human Development in Europe”

HD in Africa

• Fosu, Augustin Kwasi and Germano Mwabu, “Human Development in Africa”

For  more on the Human Development Report - data bases, blogs etc go here

Want to help write this year’s Human Development Report?

2010 marks two decades years since the first Human Development Report was published by the UN Development Program in 1990. Besides subsequently spawning huge numbers of useful national and thematic reports, the global HDRs have become some of the most influential of annual development analyses, for many years providing an invaluable intellectual counterweight to some of the excesses and errors of the Washington Consensus, which was at its zenith when that first HDR was published.

The 2010 Report, Rethinking Human Development, will contain a conceptual restatement of human development. One of the contributors, Sabina Alkire of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) has drafted a 1.5 page discussion and definition of Human Development and is calling for feedback and suggestions for improvement by the end of January. Please respond to Sabina.alkire@qeh.ox.ac.uk

‘Human Development is a process of expanding people’s real freedoms – their valuable capabilities – and empowering people as active agents of equitable development on a shared planet.

People are both the beneficiaries and the agents of long term, equitable human development, both as individuals and as groups. Hence Human Development is development by the people of the people and for the people.”

We might explain human development in terms of four parts: capabilities, process freedoms, principles, and constraints.

Capabilities: Human development focuses on expanding people’s real freedoms. When human development is successful, people are able to enjoy activities and states of being that they value and have reason to value. With human development, people live long and healthy lives, enjoy education and a decent quality of life. They are able to be productive and creative at home or at work, shape their own destiny, and together advance shared objectives. With human development, people are able to enjoy human relationships and feel relatively secure. In human development the ‘focal space’ is people lives. Resources, income, institutions, and political or social guarantees are all vitally important means and policy goals; yet ultimately success is evaluated in terms of the lives people are able to lead, the capabilities they enjoy.

Process Freedoms: Human beings are not only the beneficiaries of development; they are also agents, whose vision, ingenuity, and strength are vital to advancing their own and others’ well-being. Human development supports people as agents, both personally within families and communities, and collectively in public debate, collective action, and democratic practices. While the spaces for agency will vary, human development empowers people for good, enabling them to have voice and to participate in the processes that affect their lives. Hence Human Development is development by the people of the people and for the people.

Principles: Policies to advance human development also consider a few principles such as equity, efficiency, the sustainability of outcomes across time and on this planet. Some applications of human development apply additional principles such as a priority concern for the poorest of the poor, and whether the processes respect human rights obligations and other responsibilities. By applying these principles it is possible to identify certain policies that are more expensive, less equitable, and less sustainable than others and rule them out. The HDRs have regularly introduced principles by which to evaluate human development. By identifying the principles that are often used to guide human development, the reports invite a wider discussion of these values in civil society and also a more explicit application of these concerns in policy.

Shared Planet: A particularly important principle is environmental sustainability. Nearly seven billion people now share our small planet. Some live in extreme poverty; others in gracious luxury. The limits of our common planet will shape human development more sharply in the coming years than it did during the first twenty years. The onset of climate change requires a fundamental reshaping of the behaviours and aspirations of many persons and of the institutions that produce the goods and services we enjoy.

Clearly different nations and communities will emphasise different dimensions, principles, and forms of agency than others, such that their human development carries the melody of their culture, values, and current priorities. Indeed the concepts, poems, and speeches of different intellectuals and public figures may be drawn upon to articulate human development in different contexts. Human Development is not one size fits all; it is flexible and responsive. However we suggest that the development of effective policies and actions to support human development requires consideration of these four components.’

Interesting to compare this with the definition in the 1990 report:

‘Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices…. The three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living.

But human development does not end there. Additional choices, highly valued by many people, range from political, economic and social freedom to opportunities for being creative and productive, and enjoying personal self respect and guaranteed human rights.’

The obvious changes are the greater focus on equity and environmental constraints and group, as well as individual, freedoms. There is also more of an emphasis on agency – people ‘doing it for themelves’.

Over to you for comments to Sabina. See here for her longer background paper (under construction).

Measuring wellbeing – the latest from UN and OECD. But can Costa Rica, Dominican Republic and Jamaica really be the world’s happiest countries?!

The criticisms of GDP as a pretty unreliable measure of well-being have been around for decades, but policy makers persist in using it as a proxy for success, in part because of the lack of credible alternatives. Now there’s an encouraging flurry of international activity at both the UN and OECD that seeks to fill the gap.

In October the OECD’s ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’ project is holding its 3rd world conference in South Korea (for conference details see here, for previous blog, here). I’ll be attending along with thousands (well, hundreds) of statisticians. You can imagine my excitement.

Over at the UN, the Human Development Report, published by UNDP, has long been one of the most influential annual reports on development. Now, according to its director Jeni Klugman, ‘The HDR 2010 will take stock of 20 years of Human Development Reports and undertake a systematic examination of the evidence about trends in human development outcomes over two decades. This will go beyond the Human Development Index (HDI), and other related indices, to include inequality and broader aspects of poverty, agency and empowerment. It is well recognized that the HDI captures only a few people’s choices and leaves out many that people may value highly – economic, social and political freedom and protection against violence, insecurity and discrimination.’

According to Klugman, ‘The world has changed since 1990 and these changes, along with new data and research technology, should be reflected in measures of human development, poverty, and gender:
• There has been progress in people’s well being broadly defined.
• Ideas have advanced: for example, there is nowadays a consensus about the need for multidimensional responses to development challenges and a wider acceptance of Sen’s ideas on capabilities, functionings and freedoms but practice lacks behind.
• HDI is a minimalist measure of development, but the challenge is to take measurement beyond the HDI.
• New opportunities to enhance human development have emerged, such as channels for democratic activity and participation, including global participation, information technology, cooperation around concrete goals such as the MDGs, and institutional reforms at various levels.
• Conversely, new or renewed challenges to human development progress have emerged related to: deprivation traps, inequality, natural and man-made disasters, conflict, and environmental degradation.
 
Although these patterns have already highlighted key candidates for adjustments to the HDI, such as inequality and environmental sustainability, complementary measures are also important, including a new poverty measure and justice and freedom indicators.’

So the HDR team are open for suggestions on the following questions:

1.          In your country or region, have human development indices (HDI, HPI, GDI, GEM) been instrumental to promote a multidisciplinary approach to development issues beyond the economic dimension? Can you provide concrete examples?
2.          What are the main challenges in promoting human development measurement in the development debate within your country or region?
3.          Being aware that human development and poverty are much more than what the HDI or HPI measure, and bearing in mind alternative national instruments, how could the these indices best be enhanced to reflect the ‘state of the art’ insights and techniques, globally and at the national level?
4.          Acknowledging that steering analysis, reflection and action, and not ranking countries, is the main purpose of the yearly calculation of the HDI, what could be alternative ways to present the HDI or other alternative indices?
5.          Your views on how justice, respect for human rights and freedom of choice may be measured are encouraged. Can they be integrated into a general development index such as the HDI, or should a separate index on these issues be considered?

For further reading, visit the HDR website. If you want to get involved, sign up by emailing hdr-net@groups.undp.org (or have a look at the HDRnet webpage).

And meanwhile, according to the New Economics Foundation’s ‘Happy Planet Index’, which combines reported life satisfaction, life expectancy and ecological footprint, the world’s happiest country is Costa Rica, followed by Dominican Republic and Jamaica (see chart for regional breakdown). Eh? Now even as a proud Latin Americanist, that’s what I call (when I’m being polite) ‘counter-intuitive’…… For an interactive map go here.