UN's report on human development reviewed
JAKARTA (JP): Indonesian and regional experts will review the United Nation's Human Development Report which was published last week with the gloomy finding that the gap between the world's rich and poor has widened.
The Jakarta office of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is co-hosting the two-day workshop to review the regional significance of the report. The other co-host of the workshop, which starts today, is the Center for Information and Development Studies.
Minister of National Development Planning Ginandjar Kartasasmita will open the workshop.
Other speakers are from neighboring countries. They include Nay Htun, director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, and Emil Salim, chairman of the Kehati Foundation and former environment minister.
"This year's Human Development Report builds on the recognition that economic development does not automatically translate into an overall improvement in the quality of life," C. Jan Kamp, UNDP's representative in Indonesia, said.
"We hope the report will contribute to the discussions on how countries worldwide can strengthen their development plans and policies to improve the people's daily lives, rather than serving economic purposes alone," Kamp says.
The report, launched in Tokyo on July 17 and published by Oxford University Press for the UNDP, focuses on economic growth and human development.
The report found that economic growth had failed for a quarter of the world's people. "If present trends continue, economic disparities between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to inhuman," James Gustave Speth, UNDP administrator, wrote in the report's foreword.
On Indonesia, the report's ranking of its real per capita gross domestic product had improved from 99 (out of 174 countries surveyed) last year to 88 this year. But Indonesia's ranking according to a human development index -- the main composite index in the report which tries to capture as many aspects of human development as possible -- only improved from 104 to 102.