The United Nations Development Programme launched on 4 November 2010, the Human Development Report.
Some of the report's highlight:
"The report, now in its 20th year, introduces the new Human Development Index (HDI), a composite measure of progress in education, health and income, complemented by three innovative indices for gender, inequality and multidimensional poverty. These new indicators confirm that progress is possible even without massive resources. Among the "top movers" –countries among the 135 that improved most over the past 40 years – are Ethiopia (#11), Cambodia (#15) and Benin (#18), all of which made big gains in education and public health rather than income."
"Yet patterns of achievement vary greatly, with remarkable differences in how countries mobilize and use public resources to pursue human development. The region with the fastest progress since 1970 is East Asia, led by China and Indonesia. The Arab countries also posted major gains, with 8 of the 20 "top movers". However, many countries from sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union lag behind, due to the impact of AIDS, conflict, economic upheaval and other factors."
"On average, rich countries have grown faster than poor ones over the past 40 years.
"The divide between developed and developing countries persists: a small subset of countries has remained at the top of the world income distribution and only a handful of countries that started out poor have joined that high income group," the report concluded."
Explore the report at http://hdr.undp.org/en/
