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On 24 May 1990, the Human Development Report (HDR) was launched to prompt new thinking –and action– on development. It was a groundbreaking publication, and the start of the yearly tradition that applied the human development lens on putting people at the centre of major global policy debates.
“People are the real wealth of a nation. The basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to live long, healthy, and creative lives. This may appear to be a simple truth. But it is often forgotten in the immediate concern with the accumulation of commodities and financial wealth.” – 1990 Human Development Report
The Report challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that economic growth was an adequate and sufficient means by which to assess progress in human well-being.
“The expansion of output and wealth is only a means. The end of development must be human well-being.” – 1990 Human Development Report
The Report's team, led by Mahbub ul Haq, a prominent development economist and former Planning Minister of Pakistan, contended that ‘enlarging people’s choices’ should serve as the defining principle in evaluating a country's progress in the welfare of its people.
“Human development is a process of enlarging people's choices. In principle, these choices can be infinite and change over time. But at all levels of development, the three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living. If these essential choices are not available, many other opportunities remain inaccessible.” - 1990 Human Development Report
The multiple dimensions of human development, the 1990 Report stated, included economic, social and political freedom, and protection against violence, insecurity and discrimination. Moreover, the concept was not limited to the acquiring of these choices, but also -- and essentially -- to active participation in their determination. People must be both the agents and the recipients of human development. Subsequent reports have dealt with many of these dimensions of human development.
The 1990 Report was a landmark not only in promulgating the message of human development, but also in putting forward a new method by which to measure its progress between countries -- the Human Development Index (HDI).
In 1990, however, there were few ways to measure many of the wider dimensions of human development. The HDI, therefore, focused on indicators of what the 1990 Report determined to be the essential ones: life expectancy (a long and healthy life); education (knowledge) and income (access to resources).
The Report argued the HDI’s virtue of incorporating human choices other than income. But it also stressed its potential for refinement as more aspects of human choice and development were quantified and laid out a concrete agenda for better data collection.
The impact of the HDI has been fundamental to the assessment of progress between countries on the welfare of their people. Its significance was recognized from the beginning.
“Challenging traditional ways by which the world has measured the growth of nations, a new report issued by the United Nations Development Programme concludes that there is no automatic link between a country's per capita income and the well-being and progress of its people. The Human Development Report 1990 … is intended to touch off a debate in the last decade of this century over why some nations, however poor in resources, make life better and others fail.” – The New York Times
“‘People in the centre of development’ will surely become one of the catchphrases of the 1990s.” – The Guardian [UK].
“The report, in its conclusions, challenges some basic practices of the industrialized nations and the international agencies they dominate, such as the World Bank. It cautions that, despite the global inability of communist economies to compete with capitalist systems, capitalism also frequently has failed to achieve basic human development.” – The Washington Post
“For UNDP, human development means a strong commitment to grassroots approaches and a refocusing of energy in areas such as education, health nutrition, shelter and employment. It also means helping countries to put people back at the centre of development.” – The Bangkok Post
“The strength of the HDI is in reminding those who cannot see beyond the end of their statistics that there is more to life than GNP.” – The Economist
Orders for all past editions of the Human Development Report must be addressed to the Human Development Report Office. An online form is available for this purpose.
Older editions of the Report are sometimes available yet in very few numbers and for only certain language editions.
If we no longer have copies of the report you seek it is at times possible to find them for sale online.
