Owais Parray, Jakarta – Last November, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released its 2007/8 Global Human Development Report. Every year the report focuses on a particular theme, examining it from a human development perspective in order to stimulate dialog and offer policy choices for the future.
The report has already fueled debate on one of the major challenges facing countries, the rising temperatures and climate change which threaten to undermine human development, particularly in less developed counties. In Indonesia, the release of the report coincided with the Climate Change Conference in Bali in December 2007.
Many in Indonesia are curious about the progress the country has been making in recent years.
The human development report provides a ranking of countries measured by a "human development index" (HDI), which is a composite of development scores measuring life expectancy, education and income. The evolution of the human development concept owes much to the work of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and Pakistani economist Late Mahboob-ul-Haq, who saw it as a broader and more suitable method of defining development.
Unlike measuring development in purely economic terms such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the human development index extends the definition to quality of life, where people are central in development rather than seen as "inputs" for development.
Until the monetary crisis, Indonesia enjoyed impressive growth rates that enabled it to make major strides in improving public services and reducing poverty. Although progress in recent times has not been as impressive, overall Indonesia has done quite well on the HDI. A point to note here is that data that has been used in this year's report mostly comes from 2005, so it may not be a complete reflection of the current situation.
Having said that, if compared a short-term basis changes may not be all that noticeable because they mirror outcomes that occur over an extended period. If you see Indonesia's progress in this long-term context, the country has arguably been the best performer in Southeast Asia. To illustrate this, let's compare Indonesia, which is ranked 107, with two of its closest and more developed neighbors – Malaysia and Singapore. Both are ranked much higher than Indonesia. But if we look at the aggregate performance from 1975 to 2005, Indonesia managed to add approximately 25 points to its HDI, while Singapore and Malaysia added roughly 20 points each to their score over the same period.
If you also compare Indonesia's performance with countries from other regions, it appears that only Oman (33 points) has performed better than Indonesia during this period.
Indonesia scores on both GDP and life expectancy indices are fairly low, while its education index is almost at the same level of Malaysia, which is ranked 63 overall on the HDI. Interestingly, there are a number of countries with higher HDI rankings which have low GDP per capita rates; their rankings are boosted by good scores in education and health.
Not surprisingly, these countries provide (or did until recently) a whole range of social services to their people. Cuba stands head and shoulders above other countries if you compare its total HDI score minus the GDP index. Other countries that do well in this respect include Armenia, Ecuador and Georgia. Except Tanzania, very few countries grouped under the report's "Low Human Development" category exhibit high positive HDI scores minus the GDP. Botswana, though, which is included in the "Medium Human Development" list of countries, is an interesting case. Its GDP Index ranking is quite high, even higher than Malaysia, but it is ranked 124 largely because of its low life expectancy rate.
So, where does Indonesia go from here? Indonesia's slow economic growth rate has meant it is not moving up fast on the human development ladder. Indonesia could go up 10-20 places if there were a reasonable increase in its GDP. Not to say that the improvements in other indices won't help it to move upwards. Indeed they can.
As a matter of fact they are interrelated, so improvements in one automatically lead to improvements in other dimensions.
However, addressing income poverty will be an effective short-term measure to register gains in life expectancy as well because as I have argued the latter reflects outcome which occurs over a longer period of time. So, in the short-term, income poverty should be a major development priority for the country. Unlike the past, though, future efforts in this direction should take into account Indonesia's decentralization to ensure that districts and provinces which until now have been lagging behind contribute to future economic growth.
The country as a whole has to grow, and not for the sake of growth alone, but to make growth a means of enhancing the quality of life for people.
[The writer provides advisory support to a joint Government of Indonesia and UNDP project. The opinions expressed here are strictly personal. He can be reached at owaisparray@hotmail.com.]