More than 40 southern countries experienced significantly greater human development than specialists would have predicted 20 years ago, but global temperature shifts could yet undermine their progress, says a United Nations report.
According to the UN's 2013 Human Development Report, the rising supereconomies of Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey made rapid advances since 1990 in their human development index (HDI) for 2012.
The HDI is a system which combines statistics such as life expectancy, education and income into one rating. The report also noted significant progress in smaller economies such as Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Tunisia.
The economic output of the emerging world’s three largest economies – Brazil, China and India – now equals the combined GDP of the West’s traditional industrial powers, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, said the report, Rise of the South.
“These are challenging times but the report shows the success of development over the last several decades, strived for by the countries themselves and through development cooperation,” said Olav Kjørven, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations Development Programme.
Besides development aid, the report said that active state-driven reforms were a main cause of the rapid HDI increase, including attempts by countries to tap global markets and carry out social policy innovations.
A number of countries had completed their Millennium Development Goals three years before a 2015 deadline, it added. The first of the eight goals, agreed by the world’s governments at the start of the millennium, was to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day compared to 1990. In Brazil, this fell from 17.2% to 6.1% of the population; in China from 60.2 to 13.1%; and India from 49.4 to 32.7%.
“The Southern countries are no longer just providers of raw materials to the rich countries,” Kjørven said. “The next goals should apply to all countries.”
Unpredictable climate
But Kjørven said governments still had to deal with “protracted problems” such as climate change or risk the further expansion of poverty in the developing world. “We are not as a global community living up to those challenges,” he said.
Countries with a low HDI contribute the least to global climate change but they are likely to feel the strongest effects, with an increase in unpredictable weather events and the greatest loss of annual rainfall, which affects agricultural production.
“Confronting environmental challenges is the most pressing. The cost of inaction is likely to be high,” Kjørven said.
He added that the developing world would struggle to maintain their HDI progress unless governments acted quickly to curb climate change. “It is not going to happen unless strong policy measures are taken.”
Bangladesh, one of the countries to have seen a marked HDI improvement, said that investing in the green economy was a priority as it attempted to shed its aid dependency by the mid 2020s. “We are one of the most climate-vulnerable countries,” said Ismat Jahan, ambassador of Bangladesh to Belgium, Luxembourg and the European communities.
"The South needs the North and the North needs the South," she added.
Wealth concentration
As developing countries such as China and Brazil grow richer, islands of wealth have emerged amongst the elite in society. “One of my criticisms [of the report] is its relative silence on the issue of [wealth] distribution in countries and between countries,” said Dr Andrew Fischer, a development expert at the International Institute of Social Sciences in The Hague. He said that wealth distribution had played an important role in levelling HDI levels in South Korea.
According to a 2011 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, household incomes in the richest 10% of society in OECD member countries grew faster than the poorest, so widening income inequality.
Brazil and South Africa, two of the countries featured in the UN report, score poorly in the OECD's Gini coefficient, an index which ranks income distribution.
“My fear is that the [rise of the south] optimism is diverting our attention from greater global processes of concentration of wealth,” Fischer said.