One can’t fully measure the human development through income alone. Such was the idea behind Mahbub ul Haq’s contraption, the Human Development Index, and its container, the Human Development Report. By no means a reinvention of the wheel, it is still certainly a composite index and therefore plagued by the problems that come hand in hand with such a thing (an incessant tendency to rank, to not provide the complete picture, to not be friendly to further calculation, and to force a nation to both compete with and be complacent with ones fellow nations). However, Dr. Haq’s idea was that statistics like National Product or Per Capita Income would be even poorer indicators of how a county is doing. A composite index such as the HDI takes into account many other factors such as health, poverty, and education levels, making it a much better indicator of the development level of a country’s people.

Paul Steeten, who worked with Dr. Haq at the UNDP, writes, “We got into terrible trouble when Mahbub wanted to say that development means enlarging choices not of trees, but of people”. Surely trees contribute to development but that would be a different index, mapping a very different thing. Dr. Haq’s index tries not to go beyond the basic necessities of a populace.

A composite like the HDI that has been computed for over forty years has many stories to tell. The composite has been updated with newer more indicative measures but still stays true to Dr. Haq’s original idea. The recent changes replace literacy rates with mean years of schooling, and the gross national product has been replaced by gross national income.

One finds that many of the human development components of the indicator tend to converge, though that is not true of the income components. What this says is that although over time, the world’s nation’s earnings may not be converging, but literacy rates, life expectancy, and mean years of schooling are. This suggests that the overall quality of life too, at least in terms of these indicators, is equalizing around the world and seems to be generally independent of a nation’s monetary situation. This fact is highlighted by the HDI, where from 1970 to 2010, almost every country, including Pakistan, has had an increase in HDI of around .2 points out of 1. A drop in points goes against the trend and generally tells a terrible story.

So where does Pakistan stand in such a list, what is its story?

Over the past four decades, Pakistan has shown steady growth, going from around .31 in 1980 to 0.49 in 2011 with no real fluctuations from this trend at a growth of around 1.6% a year. The lack of fluctuations in Pakistan’s HDI growth could mean that things have been improving slowly, however it also means that no policy change in the past 40 years has led to any form of miracle growth. It could also mean that an increase in one indicator may be balanced off by a decrease in another.

Pakistan’s neighbours too have had similar growth patterns. India has gone from .32 to .51 at a similar rate, while Bangladesh has grown slightly faster than both these countries, growing from .26 at its inception to almost catch up to the other two giants at .46 growing at around 2% a year.

A twist in the plot comes when we break down the index into its component parts of income, health, and education. While both Bangladesh and India are better off than Pakistan in education, health is one index where Pakistan ranks the highest amongst these three countries though it is still far behind other countries such as Turkey and Iran. The income index tells a very interesting story, interpret it as you may; despite Pakistan’s income index being much higher than both India and Bangladesh in the 70s, at the start of the 90s, Pakistan’s income index flat-lined, allowing India (and many other countries) to easily surpass it. Pakistan’s income index has shown some life these past ten years, but the lost 90′s have cost it a decade of monetary growth.

When looking at poverty, one needs to take into account other indicators from the HDR, such as the Multidimensional Poverty Index, one of HDR’s newer indexes. Instead of looking at people who live under 1.25 (Parity adjusted) dollars a day, per capita income, or using a country’s own definition of poverty, it takes a very different approach. This multidimensional poverty measure looks at three types of poverty: living standards, health, and education. The results are staggering; in Pakistan, where 23% of the people live below 1.25 (parity adjusted) dollars a day, over 51% of the people live below the multidimensional poverty line. Similarly, in India, where 28.6% of the people are below the national poverty line, almost 56% of the population lives below the multidimensional poverty line. The results are the opposite in a more developed Sri Lanka, where the national poverty line puts 23% of the population below it, but with high education and health standards, only 5% of the people there live in multidimensional poverty.

The HDR also publishes an inequality adjusted HDI, a much better tool for looking at developing nations as it takes into account the distribution of the basic necessities. According to the new index, Pakistan’s .49 index, India’s .51, and Bangladesh’s .46 all collapse down to numbers between .33 and .36.Pakistan takes its biggest hit in education where it scores .19, only a handful of countries such as Niger and Ethiopia are below it. It does comparably better in other sectors, scoring a .5 in the health indicator, and .38 in the income indicator.

Although most of these factors may be evident to us just by looking out the window, the HDR does a wonderful job of putting these numbers together for us to provide us with a bigger picture than what income indicators can provide. We know that Pakistan has steadily developed overall in the past 40 years, but not as fast as we would want it or expect it to, nor equally in all sectors. It also comes as no surprise that Pakistan has one of the worst education systems in the world; the broken system is what is currently being ignored and pushed under the rug without much hue and cry. We also know that the 90s were a lost decade in terms of income, and that Pakistan’s healthcare system isn’t awful when compared to other developing nations.

It is through composite rankings such as the HDR and the data behind them that most of us are able to find the problem areas, and to attempt to rectify the problems. Just as how without an annual publication on the educational statistics of Pakistan, many of us are able to forget or ignore the problem of education in Pakistan. Indexes such as the HDR should keep us from blowing issues out of proportion and at the same time, keep us from ignoring or forgetting them. Dr. Haq’s efforts and contributions should serve as a constant reminder of both the areas we are succeeding in and those that we are doing poorly in.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to be present at one of the launches of UNDP’s 2010 Human Development Report. The report has been an annual publication for the past twenty years and its premier index (the Human Development Index) is one of the most cited composite measures of a country’s human development. Both the index and the report are the brainchildren of Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, who has held the position of Director of Policy Planning at the World Bank and has also served as the Minister of Finance and Planning and Chief Economist in Pakistan in past decades. The speakers at the launch included Jeni Klugman and Francisco Rodriguez, the head author and head researcher for the report, as well as development economists Ted Miguel and Pranab Bhardan.

Each speaker referred to Dr. Haq time and time again with the utmost respect, highlighting his contributions to the Human Development Report and emphasizing his ideas, one of which was that one can’t fully measure the human development or growth of a society through income alone. They repeatedly referred to him as a Pakistani economist whilst discussing his achievements and contributions. To hear renowned professors and top economists and hear them speak in awe about a fellow Pakistani is truly a feeling in its own.

Moving back to the report, an article in the HDR itself talks about how Nicholas Sarkozy recently gave a speech claiming that focusing on the GDP in evaluating the overall well-being in an economy would lead to one missing out on many other aspects. The article also specified that unbeknownst to Sarkozy, the idea itself had actually originated in Karachi, over four decades ago, in the mind of Mahbub Ul Haq who then went on to become one of the founders of the Human Development Theory along with Amartya Sen.

During Dr. Haq’s tenure at the World Bank, he was able to make several contributions towards improving the social sector by targeting issues such as poverty alleviation, water policy and education. He made similar contributions whilst working as the finance minister in Pakistan by implementing policies for poverty alleviation and focusing on human development. Despite the acclaim he received for the two books and the few articles he authored, he chose to focus on his career more towards the applied side of development economics rather than the academic one.

During the presentation, Jeni Klugman pointed out one interesting fact: that growth in income is not a big driver of change in human development. That is, we find that income growth and human development growth have a very weak and statistically insignificant correlation. One could argue that that change in human development indicators only occur much after the growth has taken place. However, other research shows that change in income is not correlated with change in life expectancy at any time for 30 years. Similar research shows a lack of correlation of income growth with change in health, education, or even political freedom.  In fact, there are examples of countries with falling GDPs such as Iran and Venezuela that have concurrently had improvements in human development indicators. While there are many fine points to argue, this once again, brings one back to Dr. Haq’s Idea of Human Development, where other factors need to be observed as well, to give a fuller (and possibly more realistic) picture of a country.

Pranab Bhardan’s take on the HDR was a bit more critical of composite indexes, though he pointed out that the development process of the index was essentially a collaboration of economists from many different countries, and that good things do come from collaboration across borders.

Overall the presentation was well received, and while I learnt a lot from it, I kept thinking about Dr. Haq and his contributions to society, and how highly others think of him. It seems obvious that Dr. Haq was very inclined towards human development in South Asia, especially in Pakistan. He spent his latter years working for development in Pakistan. One important contribution of his was the founding of a policy research institute in Islamabad that was renamed in his honour after his death. Apart from the Human Development Report, he also started a report especially for human development in South Asia.

Despite making a name for himself in the field of economics and human development, becoming a significant member of the United Nations Development Program as well as serving as Finance Minister and Chief Economist for Pakistan, it seems strange that one rarely gets to hear about him. I believe that we should celebrate Pakistanis who have made such positive contributions not only to Pakistan but to the world and take their lead. In the case of Dr. Haq at least, it is sad that one does not hear about him, even though his contributions to the world are significant.