Photo: UN
The UN has released the the United Nations’ Human Development Report. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the report and it has taken on a historic milestone as it charts human progress some 20 years before that first reports publication. The first Human Development Report, was released in 1990, for which its basic and simple purpose was to see that the guide all subsequent reports was the vision: “People are the real wealth of a nation.” In the decade since the vision of the report has been supplemented and backed by both “empirical data and a new way of thinking about and measuring development, the Human Development Report has had a profound impact on development policies around the world”.
According to the UN Development Program, human development is;
The expansion of people’s freedoms to live long, healthy and creative lives; to advance other goals they have reason to value; and to engage actively in shaping development equitably and sustainably on a shared planet. People are both the beneficiaries and the drivers of human
The 2010 UN Development Program’s report concluded significant progress, higher than believed, has been made since 1970 and that the most significant progress has been made in some of the poorest countries. The countries improving most since 1970 are Oman, China, Nepal, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Laos, Tunisia, South Korea, Algeria and Morocco. The report also looked at international aid, and concluded that it does make a sustainable impact.
The overall standings of the report showed that the average global life expectancy has risen to 70 years-old in 2010, up from 59 years-old in 1970. School enrollment through high school reached 70 percent of eligible pupils, up from 55 percent, and average per capita income doubled to more than $10,000 in the 135 countries noted in the report, which covers statistics for some 92 percent of the global population.
The 2010 report his introduces three new measures —the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, the Gender Inequality Index and the Multidimensional Poverty Index.
At the top of the reports scale lies Norway, followed by Australia, and New Zealand. The United States lies in fourth in the rankings, just ahead of Ireland, who is then followed by Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Canada, Sweden and Germany. while the United Kingdom found itself in 26th place – lying behind all of the western European nations, and Hong Kong.
In an introduction to the report, the Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen, whose work inspired the Human Development Index, writes;
“Twenty years after the appearance of the first Human Development Report, there is much to celebrate in what has been achieved. But we also have to be alive to ways of improving the assessment of old adversities and of recognizing—and responding to—new threats that endanger human well-being and freedom.“
