ANALYSE (fra FN)
By Francisco R. Rodríguez
Head of Research Team, Human Development Report Office, UNDP
Has the world become a better place to live in during the past few decades? Views on the answer to this deceivingly simple question vary widely.
For some, the past 40 years have seen the expansion of a voracious (grådig-grisk) form of glo-bal capitalism that has made people more vulnerable by taking away many of their basic protections.
For others, this is the golden age of globalization, in which many coun-tries decided to embrace the logic and opportunities of the market and have seen unprecedented progress as a result.
What does the data say? As part of our research for the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR), we are looking at the evolution of the Human Development Index (HDI) to try and find the answer.
In a forthcoming background paper (available online in April), George Gray and Mark Purser show some striking stylized facts based on studying global trends in HD since 1970.
The past four decades have, by and large, been a period of substantial progress in human development for the world as a whole.
The world’s average HDI (indeks over menneskelig udvikling/levestan-dard) grew by 29 per cent in this period. Only one of the 111 countries in the dataset saw a decline in its HDI since 1970. (That country is Zambia).
Strikingly, the improvements in the HDI come from improvements in education and health.
In 1970, 60 percent of adults in the world knew how to read and write and 48 percent of school-age children were enrolled in school. By 2007, those figures had respectively risen to 84 and 71 percent.
So does this mean that the free-marketeers are right in arguing that thanks to globalization, people in the developing world are now better off? Not so fast.
The evidence shows that the massive increases in education and health achieved over the past 40 years had little if anything to do with globalization.
They had to do with the decision by states to expand their educational and health systems, coupled by initiatives of the international commu-nity to enable access to vaccines and antibiotics. The increase in human development is actually an example of how state intervention works.
Another striking finding by Gray and Purser is that the correlation (samspillet) between economic growth and changes in the non-income components of human development over their period of study is nearly zero.
These results suggest that the often-repeated dictum that growth is a necessary condition for increasing human development is simply not true.
These findings merit further research and investigation in order to understand the causes of improvements in human development and the policies that can be implemented to close the gaps more rapidly.
Knowledge of the past is vital for understanding and shaping our future, yet there is no guarantee that what worked before will continue in our rapidly changing world.
And the fact that there is progress should not lead us to forget that these gaps are still huge. A person born in Afghanistan, for example, can expect to live only 44 years in 2007, 39 years less than someone born in Japan.
Understanding how we can sustainably eliminate these differences is probably the most important question facing humanity. This is one vital question we hope to answer in the 2010 HDR this autumn.
Kilde: http://hdr.undp.org/en/mediacentre
