THE UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM:

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORTS

By: Ruth Gibbs, Carrie Kampf, Mike Johnson

I. Scope and Editorial Policy:

As defined by the Human Development Report, "development is the process of enlarging people's choices." Launched in 1990, the Report is a comprehensive guide to global human development, and contains thought provoking analyses of major issues, updated Human Development Indicators that compare the relative levels of human development of over 175 countries, and agendas to help transform development priorities.

The 1998 Human Development Report looks at Human Development from the perspective of consumption patterns and their implications for Human Development. The Report delivers a message of qualified optimism recognizing that the rate of consumption has been increasing at a rate that is detrimental to the survival of all. Despite the dramatic surge in consumption in many countries, "all is not well." More than a billion people lack the opportunity to consume in ways that would allow them to meet their basic needs, while others are consuming at a rate that cannot be sustained environmentally, or socially, are detrimental to our well-being. In order to reverse this situation, an adjustment in consumption patterns is mandatory. While the Report clearly acknowledges that poverty has been declining, in order for dramatic changes to occur, greater widespread use of new approaches and technologies to make consumption more sustainable must be applied. To moderate the growing inequity between and within countries, new ways must be found to gain stronger international support for poor countries.

Standards of Quality:

The Human Development report is the product of a collaborative effort by a team of eminent consultants and advisers and the Human Development Report team. The analysis and policy recommendations of the Report do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations Development Programme, its Executive Board or its Member States. The independent views and professional integrity of its authors ensure that the conclusions and recommendations offered are objective and will have a widespread audience. The credibility of the report is further enhanced by the statistical compilation of variables to create the Human Development Index (HDI), the Human Poverty Index (HPI), and the Gender-related Development Index (GDI).

Methodology

Since its inception, the HDR has introduced three indices for human development: The Human Development Index (HDI), the Gender Development Index (GDI), and the Human Poverty Index.

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• The Human Development Index (HDI): Based on three indicators: longevity, as measured by life expectancy at birth; educational attainment, as measured by a combination of adult literacy (2/3 weight) and the combined first, second and third-level gross enrolment ratio (1/3 weight); and standard of living, as measured by real GDP per capita (PPP). For the construction of the index, fixed minimum and maximum values have been established for each of the indicators mentioned:

• The Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure. The GDI uses the same variables as the HDI. The difference is that the GDI adjusts the average achievement of each country in life expectancy, educational enrolment and income in accordance with the disparity in achievement between women and men.

• The Human Poverty Index (HPI) for developing countries concentrates on deprivations in three essential dimensions of human life already reflected in the HDI – longevity, knowledge and a decent standard of living. The deprivation relates to survival – the vulnerability to death at a relatively early age. The second relates to knowledge – being excluded from educational opportunities. The third relates to a decent living standard in terms of overall economic provisioning. The HPI for industrial economies concentrates on the above mentioned deprivations for developing countries with an addition deprivation focusing on social exclusion, even though the living conditions in industrial economies is supposedly better.

II. Human Development Problems and Issues

1. According to the 1998 HDR, the world appears to be on a runaway consumption train. Consumption has grown at an unprecedented pace in this century reaching over $24 trillion in 1998. For the more than one billion people living at or near the margin, increased consumption is essential. For those at the top, increased consumption has become a way of life. Some aspects of consumption are undermining the prospects of sustainable human development for all.
2. This issue has created a justifiable cause for concern as consumption erodes renewable resources, pollutes the local and global environment, panders to manufactured needs for conspicuous display and detracts from legitimate needs of life in modern society.
3. The question is: What do we do about it? The answer: Call for Change in Consumption by imposing a strict way of life to make up for generations of waste by big consumers. For more than one billion of the world’s poor people, increased consumption is a vital necessity and a basic right – a right to freedom from poverty and want.
4. There is also an ethical issue of choice: How can consumption choices be made on behalf of others and not be seen as a restriction on their freedom of choice?

5. Can consumption choices made by a few be allowed to restrict the freedom of choice for all?

The Report concludes that it is not a question of reducing or increasing consumption but rather a need for a new/different pattern of consumption. Consumption patterns marshal environmental, developmental, technological and moral arguments. Therefore, an agenda for action must be established.

III. Enumeration of Materials

Each year, the Report examines Human Development from a different perspective.

The following is a summarization of each report since its launch in 1990:

HDR 1990: Concept and Measurement of Human Development

Message: The Report discusses the meaning and measurement of human development, proposing a new composite index, and addresses as its main issue, the question of how economic growth translates - or fails to translate - into human development.

Focus: It summarizes the record of human development over the past three decades, and it analyses the experience of 14 countries in managing economic growth in the interest of the broadest possible number of people.

Conclusion: The Report sets forth strategies for human development in the 1990s, emphasizing the importance of restructuring budgetary expenditures, including military expenditures, and creating an international economic and financial environment conducive to human development.

HDR 1991: Financing Human Development

Message: A more efficient and effective public sector will help strengthen the role of the private sector in human development. The best argument for additional resources is that the existing funds are well spent.

Focus: The Report points to an enormous potential for restructuring of both national budgets and international aid allocations in favor of human development. This plea does not mean that there should be an indifference to the need for economic growth, or for increased resource mobilization.

Conclusion: The lack of political commitment, not of financial resources, is often the real cause of human neglect.

HDR 1992: Global Dimensions of Human Development

Message: The richest 20% of the population now receives 150 times the income of the poorest 20%.

Focus: The Report suggests a two-pronged strategy to get out of this dilemma.

First, making massive investments in their people and strengthening national technological capacity can enable some developing countries to acquire a strong competitive edge in international markets (witness the East Asian industrializing tigers). Second, there should be basic international reforms, including restructuring the Bretton Woods institutions, setting up a Development Security Council within the United Nations, and convening a World Summit on Social Development to consider a global compact for all nations and all people.

HDR 1993: People's Participation

Message: The Report examines how and how much people participate in the events and processes that shape their lives.

Focus: It looks at three major means of peoples' participation: people-friendly markets, decentralized governance, and community organizations, especially non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Strategy: Suggests concrete policy measures to address the growing problems of jobless growth. Five pillars of a people centered world order must be built establishing new concepts of human security, new strategies for sustainable human development, new partnerships between state and markets, new patterns of national and global governance, and new forms of international cooperation.

HDR 1994: New Dimensions of Human Development

The Report introduces a new concept of human security, which equates security with people rather than territories, with development rather than arms.

Focus: It examines both the national and global concerns of human security. The Report seeks to deal with these concerns through a new paradigm of sustainable human development, capturing the potential peace dividend, a new form of development co-operation and a restructured system of global institutions.

Strategy: Proposes that the World Summit for Social Development approve a world social charter; endorse a sustainable human development paradigm; create a global human security fund by capturing the future peace dividend; approve a 20/20 compact for human priority concerns; and recommend global taxes for resource mobilization; and establish an Economic Security Council.

HDR 1995: Gender and Human Development

Message: Human Development, if not engendered, is endangered.

Focus: The Report analyzes the progress made in reducing gender disparities in the past few decades, and highlights the wide and persistent gap between women's expanding capabilities and limited opportunities; introduces two new measures for ranking countries on a global scale by their performance in gender equality; analyzes the under-valuation and non-recognition of women's work; and offers a five-point strategy for equalizing gender opportunities in the decade ahead.

Innovative feature: Introduces the design of two new composite indices - the gender related development index (GDI) and the gender empowerment measure (GEM), both of which rank countries on a global scale of gender equality. The Report also brings together, for the first time, considerable data from a sample of countries on the contributions of women and men to paid and unpaid work.

Conclusion: The unvalued contribution of women is so large that any reasonable valuation would lead to a fundamental change in the premises on which today's economic, social and political structures are founded.

HDR 1996: Economic Growth and Human Development

Message: The Report argues that economic growth, if not properly managed, can be jobless, voiceless, ruthless, rootless and futureless, and thus detrimental to human development. The quality of growth is therefore as important as its quantity for poverty reduction, human development and sustainability.

Focus: It identifies employment as critical for translating the benefits of economic growth into the lives of people.

Conclusion: The Report concludes that the links between economic growth and human development must be deliberately forged and regularly fortified by skillful and intelligent policy management. But for this to happen, new patterns of growth will need to be developed and sustained well into the 21^st century and new mechanisms must be developed to integrate the weak and the vulnerable into the expanding global economy.

HDR 1997: Poverty from a Human Development Perspective

Message: Eradicating poverty everywhere is more than a moral imperative - it is a practical possibility. The world has the resources and the know-how to create a poverty-free world in less than a generation.

Focus: Poverty of incomes as well as poverty from a human development perspective - poverty as a denial of choices and opportunities for living a tolerable life.

Strategy: Report goes beyond income redistribution - encompassing action in the critical areas of gender equality, pro-poor growth, globalization and the democratic governance of development.

IV. Particularly Significant Subsections from the 1998 UNDP Report

The 1998 Human Development Report focuses on changing today’s consumption patterns for tomorrow’s human development. The Report is divided into five chapters to address the state of human development based on consumption patterns. In addition to the discourse of consumption, the Report contains over 40 statistical tables including the development indices listed above. Two sections (Chapter 3 and 5) were of particular significance because they identify the issues of consumption and suggest an agenda for action to address the problems.

Chapter 3 - Consumption in the global village -- unequal and unbalanced

The current patterns of growth of consumption raise problems. For the purpose of measuring human development, UNDP has chosen to focus on the areas of consumption that are most essential to achieving basic capabilities to live long, healthy creative lives and to enjoy a decent standard of living. These areas of consumption include: food, shelter, clean water, education, health care, energy, transportation, communication, and freedom of creative and cultural expression.

The report concludes that there is an uneven distribution of consumption expansion globally. Worldwide consumption is up 3% since 1970, but there is a wide disparity between nations. Initial disparities were so large that increased consumption has not bridged the gap between the most developed nations and the developing. For example, in low-income countries, consumption has declined 1% annually over past 15 years. While developed country consumption has increased.

Consumption Gap Examples

Per Capita private consumption

Average Protein Consumption per person

Human consumption shortfalls hold back on human development and lead to human poverty. For example, healthcare consumption shortfall leads to disease and death and food under-consumption leads to malnutrition and decreased ability to work. Access disparities are based on income, rural vs. urban location, gender, and age.

Consumption patterns are also environmentally damaging and result in rising consumption that puts stress on the environment because of depletion of non-renewable resources, mismanagement of renewable resources, emissions of pollutants, and generation of waste beyond the "sink capacity" (Earth's capacity to absorb).

Inequalities deepen social exclusion. The social implications of consumption growth include: worker condition in production factories; consumption patterns as a reflection of social status (Max Weber); unequal distribution equals exclusion based socially placed values on consumption (types of clothes, transportation, food); and increased household credit/debt has not been matched with increased income.

Consumer rights to information and product safety are difficult to defend in global consumer market. Health safety concerns of products such as cigarettes and diets and health concerns is lacking for developing countries. Sources of product information increasingly comes from commercial advertising which lacks scientific basis for claims and is incomplete information.

Chapter 5 - Agenda for Action

When we look at the trends in consumption of the past 25 years, they present a dichotomy whereas if these trends were to continue for the next 50 years, the world of the mid-21st century, according to the UNDP Human Development Report, would look something like this:

• Global consumption expenditure would rise to levels four to five times those of 1995.
• Average annual consumption expenditure in the industrial countries would surpass $55,000 a person, compared with $20,000 today (1998).
• The consumption of the fifth of the people in the world's poorest countries would still be well under $2,000 -- not even 3% of the rich country average at that time and under 10% of rich country levels today.
• Discharges of carbon dioxide, fluorocarbon gases and many other toxic wastes would continue to mount -- with carbon emissions, for example, more than doubling.
• Fish stocks would decline, soil erosion would increase, deforestation would continue and water scarcity would become much more acute.

If these trends continue, many of the human development questions and issues posed throughout this Human Development Report would not be addressed. The challenge of the 21st century is to not make these trends destiny. In order to reverse the current trends, this reports focuses on the following:

• Raising consumption levels among the poorest to meet basic consumption needs, eliminating shortfalls in areas critical for human development.
• Moving to more sustainable, environmentally friendly consumption patterns and levels that reduce environmental damage, improve efficiency in resource use, and regenerate renewable resources -- such as water, wood, soils, fish, and trees.
• Achieving more equitable international burden sharing in meeting the costs of reducing and reversing global environmental damage -- such as global warming, acid rain, loss of bio-diversity, deforestation, erosion, and desertification.
• Discouraging patterns of consumption that have a negative impact on society and reinforce inequalities and poverty.
• Protecting and promoting the rights of consumers to information, product safety and access to products that they need.

Consumption Policy

Consumer choices have impacts on others; we are all intertwined in a negative feed back loop, which looks like this. When information is misleading, when prices fail to capture environmental costs, and when regulations fail to prevent harmful side effects, consumption choices and equality is unbalanced and negative. While the individual choices may be legal, affordable, and socially acceptable, the cumulative consequences can be devastating for human development on a worldwide scale. We as consumers are caught in an untenable system. To eradicate this unbalanced consumption framework, the policy behind it must not be ignored.

Consumption policy, according to this report, must address the following actions for change in the human development model:

• Favorable pricing, enforced by effective regulations and supported by shifts in social norms and values. … All levels of society need to be involved -- individuals, community organizations, NGOs, the private sector, local and national, and international institutions.…
• Improving information and raising awareness.
• Taking actions to ensure minimum consumption for all.…
• Promoting technological innovation.
• Tackling market distortions by removing contumacious subsidies and introducing eco-taxes.
• Establishing and enforcing adequate laws and regulations.
• Strengthening mechanisms for international cooperation.

Conclusion

In the poorer countries, increases in consumption should be planned and encouraged -- but with attention to ensuring that they contribute to human development and avoid extremes of inequity. Perspectives that focus on the future are also needed -- to avoid patterns of infrastructure or institutions that in the end may force the country into unsustainable or socially disproportionate consumption.

In the more industrialized, or richer countries, the need to maintain current poverty reduction and basic needs for all remains. All sectors of the population need to continue to feel comfortable at the current levels of consumption, well above the level of subsistence, and a shift in that comfort level in the richer nations would be scandalous.

Human development will always be a voyage of human discovery. The high levels of consumption and production in the world today present great opportunities. After a century of vast material expansion and much human progress, will leaders have the vision to seek and achieve more equitable advances in the 21st century? That has yet to be discovered.

V. Important Questions

1. Is consumption an appropriate area for policy analysis?

Is consumption an inappropriate area for policy? It has been claimed that consumption choices are independent decision of consumers and should not be interfered with. For development officials, particularly human development authorities, this logic is erroneous. There are social barriers, inadequate incomes, unavailability of goods and services, and the lack of time and access to information that may hinder consumer choices, and deplete consumers' real preferences.

2. If consumption is an appropriate area for policy, what policies should be established to create an enabling environment for sustained consumption and human development?

• Accelerate the consumption rates for poor people and poor countries without following the path of the rich and high-growth economies.
• Make production techniques more environmentally friendly
• Reverse environmental damage
• Share the burden of reducing global environmental damage and underdevelopment equitably
• Change patterns of consumption that can harm society and reinforce inequalities and poverty
• A concerted effort must be made to eradicate poverty and expand the consumption of the more than one billion poor people who have been left out of the global growth in consumption.

3. How do unrestricted market forces influence consumption patterns?

• Failure of the market to supply poor people's goods
• New incentives to accelerate the provision of poor people's good