The 2011 Human Development Report argues that the urgent global challenges of sustainability and equity must be addressed together – and identifies policies on the national and global level that could spur mutually reinforcing progress towards these interlinked goals. Bold action is needed on...

This paper analyzes the theoretical and empirical links between inequality in human development on the one hand and sustainability on the other. It specifically looks at causality in both directions. Inequality in various dimensions of human development is analyzed with respect to both weak and...

Gender inequality remains a major barrier to human development. Girls and women have made major strides since 1990, but they have not yet gained gender equity. In this paper, we review ways to measure and monitor gender inequality, providing a critique of existing measures including the first...

What are the underlying drivers of human development? This essay argues that long-term human development, in incomes, social conditions, security and so on, is fundamentally driven by capitalist dynamics and state functioning. The big issue is not state versus market, or growth versus equity, or...

This paper uses a unique data set of the Human Development Index to describe long-run human development trends for 111 countries, from 1970 to 2005. The first part of the paper shows trends by region, period and index subcomponent. We find that 110 of the 111 countries show progress in their HDI...

The purpose of this background paper is: i) to synthesize the discussions regarding the concept of human development, so as to inform the 2010 Report’s definition, and ii) drawing on the extensive policy and academic literatures, to propose relationships between the concept of human...