Human Development Report 2020

Human Development Report 2020

Subject – Governance

Context – The 2020 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), titled “The Next Frontier – Human Development and the Anthropocene” proposed a planetary pressure-adjusted Human Development Index (HDI).

Concept –

• India ranked 131 among 189 countries on the Human Development Index (HDI) for 2019, slipping two places from the previous year, according to the Human Development Report (HDR) 2020 released by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
• The 2020 Report has introduced planetary pressures-adjusted Human Development Index, which adjusts the standard Human Development Index (HDI) by a country’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions and material footprint.
• The other indices that form the part of the Report are:
  • Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI),
  • Gender Development Index (GDI),
  • Gender Inequality Index (GII) and
  • Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).

Human Development Index

• Based on three Basic Dimensions of Human Development:
  • A long and healthy life,
  • Access to knowledge, and
  • A decent standard of living.
• Norway topped the index, followed by Ireland and Switzerland. Hong Kong and Iceland complete the top five.
• In the BRICS grouping, Russia was 52 in the human development index, Brazil 84, and China 85.

Gender Development Index

The GDI measures gender gaps in human development achievements by accounting for disparities between women and men in three basic dimensions of human development—health, knowledge and living standards using the same component indicators as in the HDI. The GDI is the ratio of the HDIs calculated separately for females and males using the same methodology as in the HDI. It is a direct measure of gender gap showing the female HDI as a percentage of the male HDI. For more details on computation see Technical Notes.

The GDI is calculated for 167 countries. Countries are grouped into five groups based on the absolute deviation from gender parity in HDI values. This means that grouping takes equally into consideration gender gaps favoring males, as well as those favoring females.

The GDI shows how much women are lagging behind their male counterparts and how much women need to catch up within each dimension of human development. It is useful for understanding the real gender gap in human development achievements and is informative to design policy tools to close the gap

Gender Inequality Index

Gender inequality remains a major barrier to human development. Girls and women have made major strides since 1990, but they have not yet gained gender equity. The disadvantages facing women and girls are a major source of inequality. All too often, women and girls are discriminated against in health, education, political representation, labour market, etc.—with negative consequences for development of their capabilities and their freedom of choice.

The GII is an inequality index. It measures gender inequalities in three important aspects of human development—reproductive health, measured by maternal mortality ratio and adolescent birth rates; empowerment, measured by proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and proportion of adult females and males aged 25 years and older with at least some secondary education; and economic status, expressed as labour market participation and measured by labour force participation rate of female and male populations aged 15 years and older. The GII is built on the same framework as the IHDI—to better expose differences in the distribution of achievements between women and men. It measures the human development costs of gender inequality. Thus the higher the GII value the more disparities between females and males and the more loss to human development.

The GII sheds new light on the position of women in 162 countries; it yields insights in gender gaps in major areas of human development. The component indicators highlight areas in need of critical policy intervention and it stimulates proactive thinking and public policy to overcome systematic disadvantages of women.

Multidimensional Poverty Index

• The Multidimensional Poverty Index has been used by the United Nations Development Programme in its flagship Human Development Report since 2010. It is the most widely employed non-monetary poverty index in the world
• In the global MPI, people are counted as multidimensionally poor if they are deprived in one-third or more of 10 indicators (see figure), where each indicator is equally weighted within its dimension, so the health and education indicators are weighted 1/6 each, and the standard of living indicators are weighted 1/18 each.