Poverty And Development
This years report strikes out a new path by evolving a human poverty index which incorporates the combined impact of a short life (the chances of dying before the age of 40), lack of basic education and lack of access to public and private resources. While the human development index gives a conglomerative measure of human development, the human poverty index measures the situation of the most deprived and also their proportion to the entire population. At the top of the developing countries league come Cuba, Chile and Singapore, which have only 10 per cent of the population affected by poverty. At the bottom of the league are countries like Ethiopia, Cambodia and Mozambique. This study throws up a fascinating contrast between human poverty and income poverty. There may be more or less deprivation than indicated by the level of income poverty where a person earns less than a dollar a day. Chile, Mexico and China score much better on the human poverty index than the income poverty index, whereas Pakistan,
Thailand and Egypt have a higher level of deprivation than would be indicated by the income measure of poverty.
One important point to remember is that the report gives the ranks and positions that obtained in 1994. This means that the position could have changed somewhat since then. This is particularly true of India, which is shown as having made progress in income poverty reduction in the eighties but suffering a temporary setback in the early nineties. The rise in poverty levels in the initial years of reform, during the period when the issue prices of foodgrains went up, has been widely noted. But a reversal of sorts could have been taking place from 1994. If subsequent data does not establish this but clearly shows that the reform years have performed poorly on the human development or human poverty fronts, then the focus of the reform process will have to be reconsidered. Indias relative human development rank has changed little between last year and the present one and there is not much difference between its human development and human poverty index ranks, as also its human poverty and income poverty ranks.
China scores well on both counts but Pakistan poorly on both counts. The usefulness of such indices, which are of course not infallible, is that they throw light on whether growth is achieving its developmental goals or whether within an overall developmental record, the poor are faring well or not. From this can follow policy correctives.