BizKnowledge Watch

(CC) UNDP

The UN has just published the Human Development Report 2011, “Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All.” The report argues that the urgent global challenges of sustainability and equity must be addressed together, and identifies policies on the national and global level that could spur mutually reinforcing progress towards these interlinked goals.

The report predicts a disturbing reversal of those trends if environmental deterioration and social inequalities continue to intensify, with the least developed countries diverging downwards from global patterns of progress by 2050.

The report also looks at how the world’s most disadvantaged people would suffer the most from environmental degradation and disproportionately lack political power, making it all the harder for the world community to reach agreement on needed global policy changes.

The publication concludes with a call for bold new approaches to global development financing and environmental controls, arguing that these measures are both essential and feasible.

Also featured in the report are:

•        The 2011 Human Development Index (HDI) and

•        The Inequality-Adjusted HDI,

•        The Gender Inequality Index,

•        The Multidimensional Poverty Index.

The full text of the report is available online.

(CC) United Nations Development Programme/Flickr

The UNDP has just launched the 2010 Human Development Report, entitled “The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development”. A central objective of the Report for the past 20 years has been to emphasize that development is primarily and fundamentally about people. The 2010 report is also about how the human development approach can adjust to meet the challenges of the new millennium.

Although the past 20 years have seen substantial progress in many aspects of human development, these years have also seen increasing inequality as well as production and consumption patterns that have increasingly been revealed as unsustainable.

The Report refines the original Human development Index with new databases and methodologies, introducing three new measures:

•        The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index

•        The Gender Inequality Index

•        The Multidimensional Poverty Index.

Read the full report online.

(CC) Statsministerens kontor/Flickr

Norway, Australia and Iceland top the Human Development Index (HDI) as part of the 2009 Human Development Report (HDR) published annually by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Spain has risen to 15th position. It is based on data from 2007, before the onset of the global financial crisis.

The HDI is a composite index covering education, health and income aspects of well-being. HDI is calculated by combining a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, life expectancy, literacy rates and school enrolment at the primary, secondary and tertiary level to create a score ranging from zero to one.

The full report is available on the web.