Street art in Mar Mikhael, Beirut. March 9, 2024. (Credit: Sandrine Frem and Pao Ibrahim/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — Lebanon’s human development index (HDI), which measures economic and social development, now ranks 109 out of 193 countries, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s latest report.
The latest HDI (which reflects data from 2022 and stands at 0.723, according to the UN report) constitutes a small decline of 0.27 percent from the HDI in 2021, which stood at 0.725, and which has been in decline since the onset of Lebanon’s multidimensional crisis in 2019.
Credit: Jaimee Haddad/L'Orient Today
The HDI is the measure of a country’s average achievements in three key dimensions of human development: longevity (as measured by life expectancy at birth), education (as measured by expected years of schooling and mean years of schooling) and standard of living (as measured by the gross national income per capita).
The measure goes beyond economic growth (as measured by the gross domestic product) to assess the development of countries and provides a broader picture of the economy that includes social development.
The index, which ranges between 0 and 1, ranks countries under four categories: low human development (less than 0.550), medium human development (0.550-0.6999), high human development (0.700-0.799), and very high human development (greater than 0.800).
This means that, while Lebanon’s HDI has dropped, it continues to rank high on human development and remains higher than the HDI of all Arab states combined, which stood at 0.704 in 2022, but slightly below the world HDI of 0.739.
“Lebanon’s HDI trend has been affected by major internal crises that successively hit the country since 2019,” the UNDP’s Lebanon office said in a press release on March 14.
The impact of crises generally takes a few years to reflect considerably on the HDI, UNDP economic specialist Kawthar Dara told L’Orient Today. “Any deterioration now will be reflected more negatively in the coming years, affecting both the present and the coming generations.”
“If health, education and standards of living deteriorate today, we will have less qualified human capital, and this means less productive people with higher income in the future, which will affect the economy further” Dara added.
The UNDP report also found that “rich countries” have attained “record human development,” while “half of the poorest countries have gone backward.” Uneven development progress is increasing the gap between rich and poor countries, erasing years of development efforts to close this gap, and exacerbating inequalities worldwide.