The Human Poverty Perspective

This paper starts with the concept of human poverty and its (implicit) translation into the Millennium Development Goal framework. But it concentrates on some of the implications of this framework for development-oriented economic policies. It also seeks to place these policies within the context of current global trends in resource transfers. Some of the biggest debates emerging on the MDGs are focused on pro-growth as well as pro-poor economic policies and the critical need for domestic resource mobilization and capital accumulation. In the 1996 global Human Development Report, UNDP first introduced a multi-dimensional index of human deprivation. It was called the Capability Poverty Measure, a simple composite index based on the arithmetic mean of three indicators. These were the percentage of under-five children who are underweight, the percentage of adult women who are illiterate and the percentage of births unattended by trained health personnel. It was the first index that strove to capture the ‘deprivation perspective ’ for human development, as it has been called by Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen (Anand and Sen 1997). It sought to pose an alternative to income poverty, by daring to posit—an