Comment by Riaz Haq on October 20, 2022 at 6:27pm

Ahmed Jamal Pirzada
@ajpirzada
Doesn't look good for Pak: the human capital index has stayed flat since 2005. While "avg years of schooling" has increased from 4 years in 2000 to 6 years in 2015 (Barro-Lee dataset), the quality has not improved. Worse, the gap with regional countries has increased since 80s.

https://twitter.com/ajpirzada/status/1583239244168200193?s=20&t...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 20, 2022 at 6:55pm

The Centre’s rejection of India's latest GHI ranking does not obscure the challenge we face.

https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/let-us-not-lose-sight-of-i...

For the second year in a row, India’s government has rejected the Global Hunger Index (GHI) ranking published by two international organizations: Concern Worldwide, an aid agency, and Welthun-gerhilfe, a non-profit entity, based, respectively, in Ireland and Germany. Their annual GHI report, which is peer reviewed, has been published for the past 17 years. India was ranked No. 107 out of 122 countries, below Bangladesh (at No. 84), Nepal (81), Pakistan (99) and Sri Lanka (64). Last year, India was No. 101 out of 116 countries. The government’s petulance stems from two reasons. One is that three of the four metrics forming the index use malnutrition data on children, i.e. wasting, stunting and premature mortality. Only one of the four metrics is on malnourishment, not malnutrition, and not even hunger. So how can the index based mainly on data for children be representative of the entire population? The second objection is about the sample size, which is 3,000. That is too low and not representative, according to the government. Some in government have even attributed mala fide intent to the publishers, who they say are more keen to taint India’s image than publish objective statistics. This is unfortunately becoming a routine ploy of discrediting adverse reports by either blaming the messenger or mongering conspiracy. This certainly won’t help, and India seems to be the only country upset about the GHI scores.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 20, 2022 at 8:25pm

Why Are Some Countries Happier Than Others

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/10/20/fighting-against-poverty-the-...

To ponder the question of happiness and happy countries, one can start with the World Happiness Index.

A quick perusal identifies several Scandinavian countries at the top (with Finland leading) and others also with high per capita GDP. Yet that alone is not sufficient for one also encounters anomalies. For example, India’s is higher than for Pakistan, but the latter is listed 66 in the index while India is almost hugging the bottom at 144. Moreover, the other major country in the subcontinent, Bangladesh, for all its turbulent history is still at 107 way ahead of India.

Other anomalies are South Korea and Japan at 62 and 63, far down the list from the other rich countries. Perhaps the cause here is a work ethic and social norms that informally require long hours at work coupled with expected socializing thereafter with colleagues.

Then there is the issue of inequality. One can indeed try to assess the impact of economic inequality through its measure, the Gini Coefficient expressed from 0 to 1. Sometimes it is written in percent terms as a number from 0 to 100 and it is then referred to as the Gini Index.

It matters little to the black South African that he earns more than other sub-Saharan Africans; what matters to him is his income in relation to others in South African society. It was an underlying cause of the riots last year in addition to the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma. The World Bank has named South Africa the most unequal country in the world.

Income inequality in the US has been on the rise since the 1970s when neo-liberalism in the Democratic party undermined the progressive taxes and regulations helping to bolster the middle class as well as safety nets for the poor. Who can forget how welfare was going to be replaced by ‘workfare’ and the stories, legion in the media, about families sitting at home getting ‘rich’ on welfare checks.

Yes, the rich got richer sheltering their money from taxes in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas or the Isle of Man. Yet at the expense of the poor and the middle class with two-job families becoming the norm, and children in after-school programs because Mom wasn’t there to pick them up.

The World happiness Index summarizes what the neo-liberals achieved: the US is at the bottom of industrialized countries in North America and Europe. Of course an absence of a national health insurance program makes matters worse — it adds to worry, the antithesis of happiness.

An absence of worry, an absence of vast differences in income, social cohesion and a presence of a suitable safety net for when things go wrong. These appear to be the common denominators for happy countries.

And why not a Gross National Happiness (GNH) measure, as in Bhutan, in addition to the GDP. It is a philosophy that guides Bhutan.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 21, 2022 at 10:34am

Poverty in India:


http://www.fides.org/en/news/72953-ASIA_INDIA_Fight_against_poverty...

India has rescued 415 million people from poverty in 15 years. This was stated in the new UN report on the "Multidimensional Poverty Index" (MPI), which analyzes the data collected between 2005 and 2021. The MPI, published jointly by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), notes that India continues to have the largest number of people in the world living below the poverty line (228 .9 million), followed by Nigeria (96.7 million), while the South Asian region as a whole, with its 385 million poor, follows sub-Saharan Africa, with 579 million destitute. While noting that, in general, the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed global progress in reducing poverty, the report notes that India as a nation over a period of 15 years, on this path of poverty reduction has obtained positive results.
In India, the report reads, there are 97 million poor children (data from 2021) which means that one in five children (21.8% of the total) suffers from poverty. According to the report, India is the only South Asian country where female-headed households are poorer than male-headed households (19.7% versus 15.9%) while 90% of the country's poor live in rural areas and 10% in urban areas.
Bihar remains the poorest state in the country, while the other 10 poorest states are Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan (West Bengal has dropped out of the top 10). The poor in India remain vulnerable due to rising food and fuel prices, the UN report emphasizes. "Policies that address the current nutrition and energy crises must be a priority. About 18.7% of the entire population of India is vulnerable to poverty.
However, the report also points to India's successes in lifting people out of absolute poverty: among the 415 million people, one group that benefits is children and youth aged 0-17.
"India is an important case study for the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the first of which is to end poverty in all its forms and reduce the percentage of men, women and children in poverty by at least half by 2030", reads the UN Report.
In a scenario that shows some progress but remains dire in absolute terms, the recent "Global Hunger Index 2022" (GHI) ranks India 107th out of 121 countries, the second worst position, after Afghanistan, compared to the rest of the South Asian countries. India's score (index 29.1) places it in the "country with a serious hunger problem" category. The Global Hunger Index is an annual report published jointly by the NGOs "Concern Worldwide" and "Welthungerhilfe", designed to exhaustively monitor hunger in the world in order to implement actions and processes to reduce this situation of hunger. The GHI is based on the values of four indicators: malnutrition, child stunting, wasting and infant mortality.
On the occasion of World Food Day, on October 16, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that the number of people in conditions of food insecurity in the world has increased again, and there are now 828 million people in the world who do not have access to food, as noted in the 2022 report "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World".

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 22, 2022 at 11:09am

The HDI is a summary measure for assessing long-term progress in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living. Pakistan's HDI value for 2021 is 0.544— which put the country in the Low human development category—positioning it at 161 out of 191 countries and territories.

Between 1990 and 2021, Pakistan's HDI value changed from 0.400 to 0.544, an change of 36.0 percent.

Between 1990 and 2021, Pakistan's life expectancy at birth changed by 6.0 years, mean years of schooling changed by 2.2 years and expected years of schooling changed by 4.0 years. Pakistan's GNI per capita changed by about 62.7 percent between 1990 and 2021.

https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/specific-country-data#/countries/PAK

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Pakistan has dropped seven places in the Human Development Index, ranking 161 out of 192 countries in the 2021-2022 HDI, according to the UNDP report released on Thursday.

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/989724-pakistan-down-on-human-deve...

In the previous year, Pakistan had stood at 154 out of 189 countries.

As per the report, Pakistan’s life expectancy at birth is 66.1 years and expected years of schooling are 8. The country’s gross per capita national income is $4,624. The report has identified that different climate shocks are affecting world order, pushing back the growth that was achieved in the past few years. While doing so, it has categorised the floods in Pakistan as “an example of the climate shocks seen around the world.”

Switzerland leads the way on the latest HDI while Norway and Iceland enjoy second and third positions. Among the nine South Asian countries -- Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Islamic Republic of Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka -- only Pakistan and Afghanistan (180th position) are in the low human development category.

Bhutan (127), Bangladesh (129), India (132) and Nepal (143) are in the medium human development category. And crisis-riddled Sri Lanka has managed to improve its position by 9 points, reaching the 73rd position on the index, finding itself in the high human development category. Iran is three positions behind at 76; the next is Maldives at the 90th position.

The report, titled ‘Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World’ has found out that around 90 per cent of countries have seen “reversals in human development” in the year of the survey, pointing to a world stuck in a never-ending cycle of crisis after crisis, causing global disruptions. Per the report, the two major factors responsible for these disruptions were the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.

The Human Development Index is a measure of countries’ standard of living, health and education. This is the first time in the last 30 years that human development in a majority of countries has gone in reverse for two consecutive years.

This has pushed human development to its 2016 levels, a huge blow to the progress made on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were meant to be completed by 2030. For the year 2021, the UN had projected an HDI value of 0.75 -- the actual value has come out to be 0.732.

The report adds that the world is in a “new uncertainty complex”. Such uncertainty is created by the two years of Covid-19 which saw a series of the lethal waves of the virus.

Even though the world took quick steps to defeat the virus, the report notes, and developed vaccines to counter the threats, unequal distribution of the vaccines has created more problems in a number of low-income countries.

The pandemic-induced lockdowns and school closures also took a toll on people’s mental wellbeing across the world. The report has found out that mental distress among male minority groups in the UK saw the largest increase, and men from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan were the most affected by the disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 23, 2022 at 11:34am

World Bank report on Poverty-2022

https://journalsofindia.com/world-bank-report-on-poverty-2022/


Key findings of the report-

It stated that the world is unlikely to meet the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 absent history-defying rates of economic growth over the remainder of this decade.
By 2015, the global extreme-poverty rate had been cut by more than half. Since then, poverty reduction has slowed in tandem with subdued global economic growth.
The economic upheavals brought on by COVID-19 and later the war in Ukraine produced an outright reversal in progress.



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India’s poverty levels-

Poverty has gone up in India too. Previous estimates suggested a poverty headcount rate at the US$1.90 poverty line of 10.4 percent in 2017.
The latest estimate based on Sinha Roy and van der Weide (2022) shows that poverty at the US$1.90 poverty line was 13.6 percent in 2017.
However, the report uses data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), because there are no official estimates of poverty available since 2011.
The most recent survey data released by the National Sample Survey Office of India used to measure poverty is the 2011/12 National Sample Survey (NSS). The government decided not to release the 2017/18 NSS round because of concerns about data quality.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 23, 2022 at 11:50am

September 2022 global poverty update from the World Bank: 2017 PPPs and new data for India

https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/september-2022-global-poverty-...



The PIP website also now includes five new rounds of survey data for India (2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20). These data are based on the work by Roy and Van der Weide (2022) who use household survey data from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) conducted by the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). With these new data, poverty in India has declined in recent years, but less than previously estimated (see Figure 2 here). Hence, the inclusion of the new data leads to an increase in the poverty rate in India and South Asia, as well as the world (more than offsetting the PPP impact described above). Earlier estimates suggested a poverty headcount rate at the $1.90 poverty line (and 2011 PPPs) of 10.4 percent in 2017, compared with 13.6 percent in Roy and Van der Weide (2022).

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