Economic Growth and Development

only 44 per cent of that in England in 1931 but increased steadily to 82 per cent
in 1999 (Kenny, 2005:5). Table 1.3 shows that life expectancy in the West was
the same as in ‘the rest’ in AD1000; the difference peaked at 22 years in 1950
and declined thereafter.
Between 1990 and 2001 high-income countries increased life expectancy
by 1.8 years per decade, in South Asia by 4.5 years per decade, 3.6 in the
Middle East and North Africa, and 2.7 in Latin America and the Caribbean. By
contrast Sub-Saharan Africa lost 3.6 years of average life expectancy (due to
the HIV/AIDs crisis) (Bloom et al.,2004:10).
The Human Development Report (HDR) has been published annually by
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since 1990 and repre-
sents an ‘extensive and sustained effort to translate some core ideas of the
capability approach among other work into accessible language and opera-
tional policy prescriptions’ (Alkire, 2005:126). Enlarging one’s choices or
capabilities, according to the report, is accomplished by living a long and
healthy life, being educated, and having a decent standard of living. The report
constructs a tool to measure capabilities – the Human Development Index
(HDI). In the HDI longevity is approximated by life expectancy, knowledge by
the literacy rate and the standard of living by real GDP per capita. According
to the 1990 HDR report the lowest country on the HDI index was Niger and the
highest Japan; by 2012 Japan had dropped to tenth and Norway topped the
table while Niger remained firmly at the bottom (in 186th place).
There are notable data problems with the HDI. For the first half of the 1990s
only 59 of 171 countries had estimates of extreme poverty (living on less than
$1 per day) and only 30 had sufficient data to estimate life expectancy at birth
(Harkness, 2004). Unlike the national income accounts (GDP) and external
trade statistics there is no internationally agreed standard for presenting statis-
tics on indicators of human development. Literacy, for example, is defined
differently in different countries. School enrolment data are not comparable,
since quality of schools, drop-out rates and the length of the school year vary
substantially within and between countries. Despite these problems scholars

Thinking about Growth 29

Table 1.3 Life expectancy, 1000–1999 (years at birth for

both sexes combined)

World West Rest Difference

(West – rest)

1000 24 24 24 0

1820 26 36 24 12

1900 31 46 26 20

1950 49 66 44 22

1999 66 78 64 14

Source: Data compiled from Maddison (2006:33).