Human Development and Poverty

Andrea Milan
Intern at DESA, New York


“The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives” – Mahbub ul Haq, Founder of the Human Development Report.

Development and poverty are key issues in current international politics and economics. The last decades of unprecedented economic growth have not benefited everyone in the world; in other words, development has not allowed all people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives.

There is no consensus on the impact of globalization on poverty. From 1980 to 2004, according to the World Bank, the percentage of world population below the poverty line has been decreasing from 40% to 18%; however, almost 1 billion people are still below the poverty line (2004 estimates). On the contrary, countries agree on the urgency of the eradication of poverty: the heads of State and Government that signed the Millennium Declaration resolved “to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water”.

The current economic and financial is hindering the achievement of these necessary yet insufficient steps towards the eradication of world poverty. Nobel prize Amartya Sen stressed out that development is not only an economic concept and income, per se, is not an accurate measure of development. He stated that development is the freedom for the individual to live the life he wants to live.

Partly following this broader approach, the United Nations developed the idea of human development and the UN now publishes every year the Human Development Reports. The Human Development Index (HDI) was created in 1990 and it takes into consideration three dimensions of development: economic growth, health and education, measured respectively through GDP per capita, life expectancy at birth and a combined gross enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary schooling. In 1997, as the HDI was successfully introduced in the world debate, the UN created the Human Poverty Index (HPI). It is formulated differently for developing and developed countries: for the former group, the most affected by poverty, it takes into account three dimensions of poverty: life expectancy (probability at birth of not surviving the age of 40), education (adult illiteracy rate) and the standards of living (un-weighed average of the percentage of the population without access to safe water and the percentage of underweight children for their age). These new indexes are widely approved, even though some scholars stress that they lack a social dimension; other scholars point out that these indexes should include the impact of development on the environment, since the sustainability of development is the main challenge of our century.

Many different perspectives on poverty coexist but everyone agrees on one pillar: change is needed. People have to be at the heart of development. Firstly, we need to re-conceptualize economics and its priorities: firms should be driven by the willingness to improve their impact on the environment and on poverty rather than only by profit making. From a political perspective, we need specific policies to eradicate poverty: recent history has taught us that economic growth is very important but it does not eradicate poverty by itself. Finally, the most important change has to come from the populations of the North, which have to slow down their rate of consumption and be willing to help poor countries find their way out of poverty. Let’s make this world a better place for everyone.■