Summary and Critique

By Tasneem Raihan ID: 861034782

Original paper: Anand, S., and A. Sen. Concepts of Human Development and Poverty: A Multidimensional Perspective. New York: UNDP, 1997.

Summary: In this paper, Dr. Anand and Dr. Sen took the initiative to refine our view of human development in poor countries using a different methodological approach from the conglomerative perspective. They presented theoretical justifications for a new povertymeasuring index called Human Poverty Index (HPI) vis--vis Human Development Index (HDI). While the latter takes into account the progress of everyone in a community regardless of his/her financial or social wellbeing, the authors, for a more specialized view put particular emphasis on poverty dimensions of only the poor and deprived people, reflected in HPI. The authors argued that HPI and HDI should not be seen as substitutes; rather they complement each other in our understanding of poverty. The authors justified that each citizen has the right to be counted and therefore it would be unfair to ignore HDI, which is sensitive to the gains and losses of all citizens. However, HDI fails to account for the fact that a sharp regress in the conditions of the poor can very possibly be outweighed by a suitably large advancement made by the affluent portion of the society. To address this issue, the authors proposed the parallel construction and use of HPI, which focuses only on disadvantaged people of the society. In their paper, the authors cautioned not to misunderstand the relationship between HPI and income-based poverty measures. While the latter one considers only lowness of income, HPI takes a much broader view, which is congruent with the approach of human development. More precisely, the constitutive components of HPI can be divided into three broad categories such as, (1) survival deprivation (2) deprivation of education and knowledge and (3) economic deprivation. Survival deprivation is given by the proportion of a population that would be expected to die before becoming 40 years old at the current agespecific mortality rate. On the other hand, deprivation of education and knowledge is measured by the percentage of people who are illiterate. The final component is a weighted average of three numerically specific subcomponents, which are the percentage of (i) population without access to health care (ii) children who are undernourished and (iii) population without safe water. One of the reasons why the authors argued in favor of these subcomponents versus income was that the latter cannot adequately account for the poverty of people in affluent societies who are relatively poor in terms of hunger and undernourishment that result from their effort to meet other socially imposed needs such as consumption of radio or televisions, to ensure social participation.

Critique: This paper provides the theoretical background, which substantiates the construction of Human Poverty Index (HPI) to reflect progress in human development with a parochial focus on only the poor and deprived section of the society. This paper has effectively shown how Human Development Index (HDI) and HPI are fundamentally different from, but still related to each other. The authors have argued that both HDI and HPI share some common component categories though the constituent indicators may vary. For example, education is a broad category, which is taken into account while computing both HDI and HPI. However, the component corresponding to this category of HDI is a general educational index whereas illiteracy is the educational deprivation indicator for HPI. The authors have argued that HPI will probably be an improvement over HDI as literacy data has higher availability and quality than data on enrolment at differential educational establishments where the latter forms the general educational index. This should naturally question the reliability of commonly used HDI which relies on quality-wise inferior data as per the authors claim. By the same token, the authors contradict themselves as they reinforce the significance of HDI at the outset. While proposing the three poverty sub-indices to construct HPI, the authors failed to address the fact that there is a high probability that the three broad deprivational components are correlated. For example, it is quite expected that people who are deprived of access to health service and safe water have a higher chance of early mortality. Therefore, the survival sub-index, which is given by the percentage of population who are expected to die before the age 40, is actually affected by the economic deprivation sub-index to a great extent. In the presence of this sort of correlation, particular emphasis should have been placed on the methods to determine weights to attach to each subindex. Otherwise, absence of carefully measured weights would lead to multiple accounting of the same root impact. This in turn would exaggerate HPI. Nevertheless, the authors did not pay attention at all at the estimation method of the three poverty subindex weights, which apparently is a shortcoming of this paper.