2010 Human Development Report: Poor Countries Making Faster Development Gains

By Peter Omondi

New York---Most developing countries made dramatic yet often underestimated progress in health, education and basic living standards in recent decades, with many of the poorest countries posting the greatest gains, reveals a detailed new analysis of long-term (HDI) trends in the 2010 Human Development Report, released Thursday.

Yet patterns of achievement vary greatly, with some countries losing ground since 1970, the 2010 Human Development Report shows. Introducing three new indices, the 20th anniversary edition of the Report documents wide inequalities within and among countries, deep disparities between women and men on a wide range of development indicators, and the prevalence of extreme multidimensional poverty in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

The Human Development Reports, commissioned annually by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since 1990, are editorially independent from UNDP.

The 2010 Report—The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development—was launched  by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UNDP Administrator Helen Clark and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who helped devise the HDI for the first Human Development Report in 1990 with the late economist Mahbub ul Haq, the series founder. The Human Development Reports and the HDI challenged purely economic measures of national achievement and helped lay the conceptual foundation for the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, calling for consistent global tracking of progress in health, education and overall living standards.

“The Human Development Reports have changed the way we see the world,” Ban Ki-moon said . “We have learned that while economic growth is very important, what ultimately matters is using national income to give all people a chance at a longer, healthier and more productive life.”

Helen Clark said, “the Report shows that people today are healthier, wealthier and better educated than before. While not all trends are positive, there is much that countries can do to improve people’s lives, even in adverse conditions. This requires courageous local leadership as well as the continuing commitment of the international community.”

Overall, as shown in the Report’s analysis of all countries for which complete HDI data are available for the past 40 years, life expectancy climbed from 59 years in 1970 to 70 in 2010, school enrolment rose from just 55 percent of all primary and secondary school-age children to 70 percent, and per capita GDP doubled to more than US$10,000. People in all regions shared in this progress, though to varying degrees. Life expectancy, for example, rose by 18 years in the Arab states between 1970 and 2010, compared to eight years in sub-Saharan Africa. The 135 countries studied include 92 percent of the world’s population.

“Our results confirm, with new data and analysis, two central contentions of the Human Development Report from the outset: human development is different from economic growth, and substantial achievements are possible even without fast growth,” said Jeni Klugman, the lead author. “We also gained new insights about the countries that performed best, and the varying patterns of progress.”

The “Top 10 Movers” highlighted in the 2010 Report—those countries among the 135 that improved most in HDI terms over the past 40 years—were led by Oman, which invested energy earnings over the decades in education and public health.

The other nine “ Top Movers” are China, Nepal, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Laos, Tunisia, South Korea, Algeria and Morocco. Remarkably, China was the only country that made the “Top 10” list due solely to income performance; the main drivers of HDI achievement were in health and education. The next 10 leaders in HDI improvement over the past 40 years include several low-income but high HDI-achieving countries “not typically described as success stories,” the Report notes, among them Ethiopia ( No 11.

Within the pattern of overall global progress, the variation among countries is striking: Over the past 40 years, the lowest-performing 25 percent experienced less than a 20 percent improvement in HDI performance, while the top-performing group averaged gains of 54 percent. Yet as a group, the quartile of countries at the bottom of the HDI scale in 1970 improved even faster than those then at the top, with an average gain of 61 percent. The diverse national pathways to development documented in the Report show that there is no single formula for sustainable progress, the authors stress.

The region with the fastest HDI progress since 1970 was East Asia, led by China and Indonesia. The Arab countries also posted major gains, with 8 of the 20 world leaders in HDI improvement over the past 40 years. Many countries from sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union lagged behind, however, due to the impact of AIDS, conflict, economic upheaval and other factors. Life expectancy actually declined over the past 40 years in three countries of the former Soviet Union—Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation—and six in sub-Saharan Africa: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.