A measure of progress

An index 8212; ie, one number per country 8212; is only meant to highlight the issue when the medium is the message. The authors of the HDR, particularly its originator Mehbub ul Haq, were sensitive to the fact that one number each to describe the 8216;human development8217; in countries as diverse as Nepal, Bhutan, and India is only a beginning for understanding the process.

The interesting aspect of an index for a year is that it is a snapshot picture at a moment of time and does not say anything about the process of human development through time. The authors of the HDI have been showing awareness of this and have been developing methods of capturing the process.

One way of looking at the process is to see the index through time. Human development is genuinely a long haul problem and looking at the outcomes through time would take care of this. The general impression that is given is that India and East Asian countries were at the same level, say in 1960, and India got left behind. The facts are not so simple, even though the authoritative Economic Survey said so a few years ago.

In fact, if you look at the improvement of the HDI since 1960, between that year and 1997, the highest percentage improvement in HDI in large Asian countries is in the case of Indonesia, where the index went up by 103 per cent, and Thailand, by 101 per cent. The next are Pakistan, by 78 per cent, and the Philippines at a close 76 per cent. Bangladesh and India tie up for the next position by 65 per cent. They are followed by China by 54 per cent, Malaysia by 32 per cent and South Korea by 14 per cent.

So the index of improvement in human development levels gives country rankings a very different spin from the snapshots at a moment in time. The initial conditions were very different. In 1960, the lowest HDI was in Pakistan, followed by Bangladesh and India.

The HDI in countries like Korea, Malaysia and Philippines was twice the level in the subcontinent. They were high then and are high now. Larger improvement lies elsewhere. It can be legitimately argued that to go up in the index of human development from 0.20 to 0.30, needs qualitatively a different effort than from 0.30 to 0.40.

This is probably true but then a moment8217;s reflection will show that ranking countries by one index at a moment of time is subject to the same problem.

Sometimes the index gives strange results. The Indonesian economist at Cornell, W.S.H. Irawan, tells this tongue-in-cheek story of environment indicators improving in Jakarta after the East Asian meltdown on account of factories closing down and employment levels not really falling, because people start to work in the informal sector, although income levels go down.

The famous Dutch anthropologist, Jan Bremen, tells the very funny story of poverty levels going down or up in the villages he has kept in touch with for decades, depending on the requirements of senior politicians of the area. There is the more basic difficulty that when exchange rates fluctuate as wildly as they did at the time of the East Asian crisis, the changes in dollar denominated poverty rates were, in some cases, not even approximating reality. The dollar denominated component of the consumption basket of the poor lets them survive in a way the statistics would not show.

There is no escaping the fact that it is the process within a nation which is the important issue 8212; for understanding and for action. It is not that experience of other countries is not unimportant. Their successes and failures have many lessons. There is, however, no escaping the importance of your own reality.

It is true that we have a long way to go. We must achieve global standards as soon as possible. Our own failures must be remedied. But our successes must also be understood and replicated faster. That is the lesson to learn from the Human Development Report and we need to thank its authors for bringing it to our consciousness.