While the UNDP’s 2024 Regional Human Development Report for Asia-Pacific highlights the region's progress in terms of reducing poverty, improving health and education and raising standards of living, the report notes that there remain widespread disparities both within and between countries and that disruptions related to climate change, health emergencies and geopolitical instability are frustrating progress, creating new challenges and exposing existing vulnerabilities. After decades of steady improvement since 1990, the region’s HDI fell in 2020 and 2021, largely as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The decline was driven by the South Asia and South-East Asia regions, while the HDI in East Asia continued to grow, highlighting how progress in the region has been rather uneven. Some countries have developed more advanced economies and social welfare systems better suited to major disruptions like wars, climate change and pandemics. Inequalities within countries are also growing, with the income share of the bottom 50 per cent declining and the share of the top 10 per cent rising by 10 percentage points to 56 per cent between 1980 and 2021.
There also appear to be questions as to how sustainable the progress there has been in the region actually is when it comes to some countries. Sri Lanka became the first country in the region to default on its sovereign debt in decades in 2022, a fate we in Pakistan have come precariously close to and may still yet suffer if the right policies are not implemented. This is to say nothing of our vulnerability to accelerating climate change, as brought home by last year’s catastrophic flooding from which we are yet to fully recover over a year later.
In this context, it is unsurprising that our high levels of perceived human insecurity from economic, political, social and environmental threats has risen from 0.63 in 2010-2016 to 0.66 in 2017-2020. There is also the feeling that, to some extent, we are being left behind by other countries in the region. Between 2022 and 2030, India will account for 35.1 per cent of total global middle class growth, compared to our 3.1 per cent. It is clear that if Pakistan is to protect what progress has been made in improving living standards and improve its performance going forward, it needs to implement adaptation and mitigation measures for what is shaping up to be a more volatile and unpredictable world and also address the existing vulnerabilities holding us back. Our agricultural yields remain low, our education levels need to rise further, our health and disaster response networks remain fragile and we need to do a better job of unlocking the economic potential of our women. This will not only require significant social and political changes, but tasks like upgrading technology and infrastructure will also require more funds. The problem being that our debt issues leave us with quite limited fiscal space, but delaying change will only make it more difficult and costly. Taking advantage of new technologies in agriculture, industry and infrastructure will be crucial to aiding this transition, but whether we have the will and ingenuity needed to do so remains to be seen.