Issue: Exclusive Issue/September 2014
Entitled “Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience”, the Report was launched by Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzō Abe, United Nations Development Programme Administrator, Helen Clark, and the Director of the Human Development Report Office, Khalid Malik.
800 million people at risk of falling back into poverty
Persistent vulnerability threatens human development. And unless it is systematically tackled by policies and social norms, progress will be neither equitable nor sustainable. This is the core premise of the 2014 Human Development Report.
According to income-based measures of poverty, 1.2 billion people live with $1.25 or less a day. However, the latest estimates of UNDP Multidimensional Poverty Index reveal that almost 1.5 billion people in 91 developing countries are living in poverty with overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards. And although poverty is declining overall, almost 800 million people are at risk of falling back into poverty if setbacks occur.
“By addressing vulnerabilities, all people may share in development progress, and human development will become increasingly equitable and sustainable,” stated UNDP Administrator Helen Clark.
The Report provides a fresh perspective on vulnerability and proposes ways to strengthen resilience.
The 2014 Human Development Report comes at a critical time, as attention turns to the creation of a new development agenda following the 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
Norway at top, Niger at last
The rankings remain unchanged at both ends of the Human Development Index (HDI). Norway, Australia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States remain in the lead for another year, while Sierra Leone, Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Niger continue to round out the list.
Despite overall gains in human development, progress in all regions decelerated over 2008–2013 compared to 2000–2008. In the Arab States, Asia and the Pacific region, and Latin America and the Caribbean, average annual growth rate in HDI dropped by about half when comparing these periods.
The steepest declines in HDI values this year occurred in Central African Republic, Libya and Syria, where ongoing conflict contributed to a drop in incomes.
It points to a slowdown in human development growth across all regions, as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI). It notes that threats such as financial crises, fluctuations in food prices, natural disasters and violent conflict significantly impede progress.
“Reducing both poverty and people's vulnerability to falling into poverty must be a central objective of the post 2015 agenda,” the Report states. “Eliminating extreme poverty is not just about 'getting to zero'; it is also about staying there.”
A human development lens on who is vulnerable and why
“Reducing vulnerability is a key ingredient in any agenda for improving human development,” writes Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, in a contribution to the Report. “[We] need to approach it from a broad systemic perspective.”
The 2014 Report takes such an approach, using a human development lens to take a fresh look at vulnerability as an overlapping and mutually reinforcing set of risks.
It explores structural vulnerabilities – those that have persisted and compounded over time as a result of discrimination and institutional failings, hurting groups such as the poor, women, migrants, people living with disabilities, indigenous groups and older people. For instance, 80 percent of the world’s elderly lack social protection, with large numbers of older people also poor and disabled.
The Report also introduces the idea of life cycle vulnerabilities, the sensitive points in life where shocks can have greater impact. They include the first 1,000 days of life, and the transitions from school to work, and from work to retirement.
“Capabilities accumulate over an individual’s lifetime and have to be nurtured and maintained; otherwise they can stagnate and even decline,” it warns. “Life capabilities are affected by investments made in preceding stages of life, and there can be long-term consequences of exposure to short-term shocks.”
For example, in one study cited by the Report, poor children in Ecuador were shown to be already at a vocabulary disadvantage by the age of six.
Timely interventions—such as investments in early childhood development—are therefore critical, the Report states.
Poor countries can afford universal provision of basic social services
The Report advocates for the universal provision of basic social services to enhance resilience, refuting the notion that only wealthy countries can afford to do this. It presents a comparative analysis of countries of differing income levels and systems of government that have either started to implement or have fully implemented such policies.
Those countries include not only the usual suspects such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, but also fast-growing economies such as South Korea and developing countries such as Costa Rica.
“These countries started putting in place measures of social insurance when their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita was lower than India’s and Pakistan’s now,” the Report observes.
However, “there may be instances in which equal opportunities require unequal treatment,” notes Khalid Malik, Director of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office. “Greater resources and services may need to be provided to the poor, the excluded and the marginalized to enhance everyone’s capabilities and life choices.”
Putting full employment back atop the global policy agenda
The Report calls for governments to recommit to the objective of full employment, a mainstay of macroeconomic policies of the 1950s and 1960s that was overtaken by competing policy goals following the oil shocks of the 1970s.
It argues that full employment yields social dividends that surpass private benefits, such as fostering social stability and cohesion.
Acknowledging the challenges that developing countries face with respect to full employment, it urges a focus on structural transformation “so that modern formal employment gradually incorporates most of the workforce,” including a transition from agriculture into industry and services, with supporting investments in infrastructure and education.
Social protection is feasible at early stages of development
The majority of the world’s population lacks comprehensive social protections such as pensions and unemployment insurance. The Report argues that such measures are achievable by countries at all stages of development.
”Providing basic social security benefits to the world’s poor would cost less than 2 percent of global GDP,” it asserts. It cites estimates of the cost of providing a basic social protection floor—including universal basic old age and disability pensions, basic childcare benefits, universal access to essential health care, social assistance and a 100-day employment scheme—for 12 low-income African and Asian countries, ranging from about 10 percent of GDP in Burkina Faso to less than 4 percent of GDP in India.
“A basic social protection package is affordable so long as low-income countries reallocate funds and raise domestic resources, coupled with support by the international donor community,” it states.
Collective effort, coordinated action needed at global level
The Report also calls for stronger collective action, as well as better global coordination and commitment to shoring up resilience, in response to vulnerabilities that are increasingly global in origin and impact.
Threats ranging from financial crises to climate change to conflicts and refugee flows are trans-national in nature, but the effects are experienced locally and nationally and often overlap. Take the case of Niger, which has faced severe food and nutrition crises brought on by a series of droughts. In the midst of a food crisis shared with other countries in the region, Niger had to cope with the additional challenges posed by thousands of people fleeing conflict in neighbouring Mali.
Trans-national threats cannot be resolved by individual nations acting independently; they require a new focus from the international community that goes beyond short-term responses like humanitarian assistance, the Report argues.
To increase support for national programmes and open up policy space for nations to adapt universalism to specific country conditions, the Report calls for “an international consensus on universal social protection” to be included in the Post-2015 agenda.
Levels in human development continue to rise – yet the pace has slowed for all regions and progress has been highly uneven, according to the latest Human Development Index (HDI) included in the 2014 Human Development Report.
The lower human development groups appear to be improving at a higher rate – grounds for optimism that the gap between higher and lower human development groups is narrowing.
Zimbabwe, for example, experienced the biggest improvement in HDI due to a significant increase in life expectancy – 1.8 years from 2012 to 2013, almost quadruple the average global increase.
Meanwhile, the rankings remain unchanged at both ends of the HDI. Norway, Australia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States remain in the lead for another year, while Sierra Leone, Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Niger continue to round out the list.
Despite overall gains in human development, progress in all regions decelerated over 2008–2013 compared to 2000–2008. In the Arab States, Asia and the Pacific region, and Latin America and the Caribbean, average annual growth rate in HDI dropped by about half when comparing these periods.
The steepest declines in HDI values this year occurred in Central African Republic, Libya and Syria, where ongoing conflict contributed to a drop in incomes.
This year’s Report presents HDI values for 187 countries, and is the first index to use the latest International Comparison Program’s conversion rates of national currencies to purchasing power parity, released by the World Bank in May 2014.
Income inequality continues to grow and education remains persistently unequal
The 2014 Report reveals that overall inequality has declined slightly in most regions, as measured by the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). This has been driven mainly by improvements in health in recent years.
However, inequality in income has risen in several regions, including among very high human development countries. Despite registering the biggest drop in overall inequality this year, the Latin America and Caribbean region maintains the global high-water mark in income inequality.
And high disparities in education persist. The Report shows that older generations continue to struggle with illiteracy, while younger ones are having difficulty making the leap from primary to secondary schooling. The highest levels of education inequality are found in South Asia, the Arab states and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The IHDI, calculated for 145 countries, shows that the lowest levels of inequality are to be found in Norway, Finland, and the Czech Republic.
When ranked by the IHDI, some countries rank lower than when ranked by the HDI.
In the United States, Gross National Income (GNI) per capita is higher than in Canada. But when the GNI is adjusted for inequality, the reverse becomes true. Similarly, Botswana, Brazil and Chile have large adjustments to GNI per capita due to high inequality.
In 16 countries female HDI values are equal or higher than those for males
The new Gender Development Index (GDI), which for the first time measures the gender gap in human development achievements for 148 countries, reveals that in 16 of them (Argentina, Barbados, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine and Uruguay), female HDI values are equal or higher than those for males. For some of these countries, this may be attributed to higher female educational achievement; for others, to a significantly longer female life expectancy - over five years longer than that of males.
Afghanistan, where the human development index for females is only 60 percent of that for males, is the most unequal country.
Worldwide, female HDI values are eight percent lower than those for males, with large variations between countries. However, the GDI shows that the disparity between genders in the estimated gross national income per capita is very high: per capita income for men at the global level is more than double that for women.
Updates on other human development indices
The Gender Inequality Index (GII) shows an overall decline. However, despite improvements in health, and incremental progress on education and parliamentary representation, women’s empowerment is still lagging. Slovenia ranks most favourably on this index, while Yemen shows the highest gender inequality.
UNDP’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) shows deprivations are declining overall, but large numbers of people – some 1.5 billion in the 91 developing countries surveyed – are still multidimensionally poor, and close to 800 million are at risk to falling into poverty if setbacks occur, whether financial, natural or otherwise.
South Asia has the largest multidimensionally poor population, with more than 800 million poor andover 270 million near-poor – that is, more than 71 percent of its population. This makes the region home to 56 percent of the world’s poor and more than 35 percent of the world’s near-poor.
UNDP is committed to full transparency. The computer programmes needed for the MPI estimation for each country are now publicly available on its web site.
However, the report also reveals that the countries in this region enjoy relatively high equality of education, health and living standards.
Social exclusion and structural vulnerabilities remain a challenge for Europe and Central Asia. Many developing countries in the region report low access to social services and social protection. Ethnic minorities like the Roma, as well as people with disabilities, the long-term unemployed, migrants, and residents of isolated rural and mountainous areas are especially vulnerable to development setbacks.
Because of its geography, the region is also vulnerable to natural disasters, especially earthquakes. A large earthquake in or near a major population centre could result in a humanitarian disaster, damage to regional infrastructure, significant refugee flows, and increased strain on often limited state capacity and social cohesion. Forecasts point to significant climate risks, ranging from threats of drought in Central Asia and the Caucasus, to increased risks of flooding in coastal areas in the Adriatic, Black, and Caspian Sea basins. As the report points out, those suffering from social exclusion tend to be the most vulnerable to these events when they occur.
“In middle-income countries, progress in sustainable development and poverty reduction requires reductions in inequalities, vulnerabilities, and exclusion, as well as better management of disaster and climate risks”, noted Cihan Sultanoglu, director of UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Europe and CIS. “This is particularly the case for the developing economies of Europe and Central Asia—many of which are still struggling to recover from the global financial crisis.”
Overall, the region comes second in the Human Development Index (HDI) rankings among developing regions, behind Latin America and the Caribbean. It surpasses world averages in life expectancy and mean years of schooling, but trails slightly in gross national income per capita. The region’s highest HDIs are reported for Montenegro and Belarus (ranked 51st and 53rd, respectively), while the lowest HDIs are for the Kyrgyz Republic (125th) and Tajikistan (133rd).
Europe and Central Asia compare favourably with other developing regions in inequality rankings as well, registering a below-average drop in human development values when adjusted for inequality. When measured by Gini coefficients, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia shows the highest income inequality, while Ukraine shows the lowest.
The 2014 Human Development Report calls for a commitment to full employment as a policy goal, the universal provision of basic social services, strengthened social protection, and better global coordination in shoring up resilience to vulnerabilities that are increasingly global in origin and impact. This report comes at a critical time for global development, as attention turns to the creation of a new post-2015 development agenda.
Between 1980 and 2013, Turkey’s HDI value increased from 0.496 to 0.759, an increase of 53.0 percent in cumulative or an average annual increase of about 1.30 percent.
The ranking of Turkey’s HDI for 2012 based on data available in 2013 and methods used in 2013 was again 69 out of 187 countries and territories.
In the 2013 HDR which is based on data available in 2012 and methods used in 2012, Turkey was ranked 90 out of 187 countries and territories.
However, it is misleading to compare values and rankings with those of previously published reports, because the underlying data and methods have changed.
Life expectancy at birth increased in Turkey by 16.6 years
Between 1980 and 2013, Turkey’s life expectancy at birth increased by 16.6 years, mean years of schooling increased by 4.7 years and expected years of schooling increased by 6.9 years.
Turkey’s GNI per capita increased by about 112.5 percent between 1980 and 2013.
|
|
Life expectancy at birth |
Expected years of schooling |
Mean years of schooling |
GNI per capita |
HDI value |
|
1980 |
58,7 |
7,5 |
2,9 |
8.656 |
0,496 |
|
1985 |
61,7 |
8,3 |
4,0 |
9.266 |
0,542 |
|
1990 |
64,3 |
8,9 |
4,5 |
10.546 |
0,576 |
|
1995 |
67,0 |
9,6 |
4,8 |
11.372 |
0,604 |
|
2000 |
70,0 |
11,1 |
5,5 |
12.890 |
0,653 |
|
2005 |
72,5 |
11,9 |
6,0 |
15.060 |
0,687 |
|
2010 |
74,3 |
13,9 |
7,2 |
16.587 |
0,738 |
|
2011 |
74,6 |
14,4 |
7,4 |
17.814 |
0,752 |
|
2012 |
74,9 |
14,4 |
7,6 |
18.011 |
0,756 |
|
2013 |
75,3 |
14,4 |
7,6 |
18.391 |
0,759 |
Comparison with OECD and EU
Turkey’s HDI value which is 0.759 is below the average HDI value of EU member states which is 0.857.
In addition, Turkey is also the second lowest-ranking country among OECD countries with the average HDI of 0.874.
Turkey’s HDI value is below all the HDI values of European Union countries. Countries which are close to Turkey in HDI rank are Bulgaria (0.777) and Romania (0.785) which are ranked respectively as 58 and 54.
Loss of 15.8% in HDI due to inequality
Turkey’s HDI for 2013 is 0.759. However, when the value is discounted for inequality, the HDI falls to 0.639, a loss of 15.8 percent due to inequality in the distribution of the dimension indices.
Gender Inequality Index, reflecting gender-based inequalities, is 0.360 for Turkey, ranking it 69 out of 149 countries in the 2013 index.
In Turkey, 14.2 percent of parliamentary seats are held by women, and 39.0 percent of adult women have reached at least a secondary level of education compared to 60.0 percent of their male counterparts.
For every 100,000 live births, 20.0 women die from pregnancy related causes; and the adolescent birth rate is 30.9 births per 1000 live births.
Female participation in the labour market is 29.4 percent compared to 70.8 for men.
Female HDI value for Turkey calculated for the first time
In the 2014 HDR, a new measure, the Gender Development Index (GDI) is introduced which is based on the sex-disaggregated Human Development Index, defined as a ratio of the female to the male HDI.
The GDI measures gender inequalities in achievement in three basic dimensions of human development—health, education, and command over economic resources.
The GDI is calculated for 148 countries. The 2013 female HDI value for Turkey is 0.704 in contrast with 0.796 for males, resulting in a GDI value of 0.884.
You may find the graphs and tables on Turkey's rankings in these indices and Turkey's comparison with other countries in this link.
Frequently Asked Questions