Reports and Publications

The 2025 Human Development Report explores the implications of artificial intelligence for human development and the choices we can make to ensure that it enhances human capabilities. Rather than attempting to predict the future, the report argues that we must shape it—by making bold decisions so that AI augments what people can do.

The 2023/24 Human Development Report assesses the dangerous gridlock resulting from uneven development progress, intensifying inequality, and escalating political polarization, that we must urgently tackle. The report emphasizes how global interdependence is being reconfigured and proposes a path forward where multilateralism plays a pivotal role.

The 2021/2022 Human Development Report unites and extends discussions from the 2019 and 2020 HDR's and the 2022 Special Report on Human Security, under the theme of uncertainty—how it is changing, what it means for human development and how we can thrive in the face of it.

The central message of this year’s Report is straightforward: to turn new uncertainties from a threat to an opportunity, we must double down on human development to unleash our creative and cooperative capacities.

In every country many people have little prospect for a better future. They are without hope, purpose or dignity, watching from society’s sidelines as they see others pulling ahead to ever greater prosperity. Worldwide many have escaped extreme poverty. But even more have neither the opportunities nor the resources to control their lives. Far too often a person’s place in society is still determined by ethnicity, gender or his or her parents’ wealth. Inequalities. The evidence is everywhere.

Universalism is at the core of the human development approach. Human freedoms must be enlarged for all human beings—not a few, not the most, but all, in every corner of the world—to be able to realize their full potential now and in the future. The same spirit is shared by the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals—leaving no one out. So human development must be ensured for everyone. However, human development is about more than satisfying basic needs.

From a human development perspective, the notion of work is broader and deeper than that of jobs or employment alone. The jobs framework fails to capture many kinds of work that have important human development implications —as with care work, voluntary work and such creative expression as writing or painting. The links between work and human development are synergistic.