Twenty years is a good enough time to assess how countries of
the world, irrespective of the economic or political system they
follow, have performed in promoting human development.
Successive Human Development Reports (HDR), since 1990, have
mainstreamed health and education as critical indicators of
human progress and contributed to international policy
structures. For instance, the Millennium Development Goals,
aimed at using international financial resources to reduce
global poverty, can be traced to the HDR-1991 on financing
development. Significantly, this year's HDR has made long-term
innovations in measuring development. First, it reconfigures its
indicators on literacy and income. Replacing ‘gross enrolment'
and ‘adult literacy rates' with ‘expected years of schooling'
and ‘mean years of schooling' makes for a deeper understanding
of this important socioeconomic attribute, particularly as
literacy rates, which are rising around the world, could gloss
over structural weaknesses. Replacing ‘Gross Domes