The Committee for Development Policy is required by Economic and Social Council resolution 1991/46 to conduct triennially a review to determine the countries to be added or graduated from the list of least developed countries (LDCs). Since the previous review was conducted in 2000, the Committee...

When in 1998 ECOSOC decided to reconstitute the previous Committee for Development Planning under name Committee for Development policy, it mandated the new CDP, among other tasks, to „… continue the triennial review of the status of least developed countries“, with the next review to be...

In this paper I want to deal with three topics: first, with the development and the ups and downs of modernization theory and its treatment of the non-Western world (I); secondly, with some basic social structure distributions and trends of human development for selected societies, including...

What is a 'sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations’? Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Aggregate indicators have been proposed to answer these questions. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indicators of...

This paper presents a new analytical framework for assessing spatial disparities among countries. It takes for granted that the analysis of a country’s performance cannot be limited solely to either economic or social factors. The aim of the paper is to combine relevant economic and...

That poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon is no longer debatable. What remains a contentious issue is whether the various dimensions of individual deprivation should be aggregated

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

Zum 20. Jubiläum des Human Development Index (HDI) haben die Vereinten Nationen einen Index für menschliche Entwicklung veröffentlicht, der nun auch Ungleichheit berücksichtigt (IHDI). Länder mit großen sozialen Disparitäten, insbesondere mittel- und südamerikanische Staaten, schneiden...