Closing the gap

Living in Pakistan can often be an exercise in pessimism. What keeps one going is not the hope that things will get better but that they will not get too bad. They will not fall apart. This is also all that can be said of Pakistan’s decline in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) rankings from 161st to 164th, out of 193 countries, for 2022. Things were already bad enough and now they are only a little worse. We are still in the ‘low’ human development category. Given that the economy was on the verge of total collapse and the flood catastrophe during the year in question, things could have been a lot worse. In fact, our HDI Value grew by the smallest of margins from 0.537 to 0.540. But, as is often the case, others did even better and left us further behind the rest of the pack than before. Let no one say that Pakistan does not make progress. Others just do it better and make the country look bad. This even includes countries like Syria, wracked by years of civil war, but still managing a higher human development score.

A country’s HDI score is a summary measure of its performance across three key areas: health, education and standard of living. They are measured by life expectancy at birth, mean and expected years of schooling and Gross National Income per capita in purchasing power parity terms, respectively. The HDI uses the logarithm of income which basically means that it is weighted in a way that reflects its diminishing importance as it grows. Going from $70,000 per year to $80,000 is a far smaller leap, proportionally, than going from $10,000 per year to $20,000. The mean of a country’s scores on these three dimension indices becomes its human development score. Pakistan has broadly improved in all three categories between 1990 and 2022. Life expectancy at birth has gone up by around 6.4 years, expected and mean years of schooling by around 3.7 and 2.1 years respectively and GNI per capita by about 80 per cent.

Aside from the fact that other countries have made more rapid progress, there is also the highly uneven nature of Pakistan’s development. When our HDI score is adjusted for inequality, it goes down by around 33 per cent to 0.360. Meanwhile, the country’s ranking on the gender inequality index remains unchanged at 135 out of 166 countries. This likely has a lot to do with how sharply our HDI score goes down when adjusted for overall inequality. Uplifting women tends to have a positive impact on socioeconomic mobility given that a woman’s health, education and income often have an overwhelming impact on her children’s development outcomes. There is simply no closing the gap between rich and poor in Pakistan without closing the gap between men and women. If going as fast as some of our neighbours is too much to ask for, we can at least try and not leave our own behind. Pakistan’s progress thus far has been too much of a bubble. Those on the outside looking in need to be included in the party if things are to improve.