Migration, both within and beyond borders, has become an increasingly prominent theme in domestic and international debates, and is the topic of the 2009 Human Development Report (HDR09). The starting point is that the global distribution of capabilities is extraordinarily unequal, and that this...

The 2013 Human Development Report – "The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World" – examines the profound shift in global dynamics driven by the fast-rising new powers of the developing world and its long-term implications for human development.China has already overtaken Japan...

The four Arab Human Development Reports 2002-2005, sponsored by the United Nations Development Program, have attracted more attention and controversy than any other official studies of development in recent years. Celebrated by many Western commentators as a courageous exercise in self-criticism...

The first Human Development Report in 1990 opened with the simply stated premise that has guided all subsequent Reports: "People are the real wealth of a nation." By backing up this assertion with an abundance of empirical data and a new way of thinking about and measuring development, the Human...

Thirty years ago, UNDP created a new way to conceive and measure progress. Instead of using growth in GDP as the sole measure of development, we ranked the world’s countries by their human development: by whether people in each country have the freedom and opportunity to live the lives they...

We may be entering a new geologic age called the Anthropocene in which humans are a dominant force shaping the planet’s future. That future is already taking frightening shape in many ways, from climate change to plunging biodiversity to the epidemic of plastics in our oceans.The strain on the...