The Philippines scored “high” in the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) Human Development Index, a measure of a country’s average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge and standard of living..
With a score of 0.718, the Philipines is110th from the top and 85th from the bottom in a list of nearly 200 countries. It ranks just after Indonesia in the world ranking that indicates how much a country has developed.
Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and Thailand are well ahead of the Philippines. So are Libya, Tonga, Mongolia, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, Albania, Cuba, Croatia, Palau and Kazakhstan.
On the bottom are South Sudan, Burundi, Eritrea, Yemen, DR Congo, Sudan and Haiti. North Korea and Somalia, both with zero scores, are in the very last ranking of the list.
The Philippines is also ahead of Pakistan and India, Bhutan, Viet Nam and South Africa.
Started in 1990, the Human Development Index or HDI is a country’s combined scores in life expectancy, literacy rate, rural populations’ access to electricity, gross domestic product per capita, exports and imports, homicide rate, multidimensional poverty index, income inequality, internet availability and many more.
The HDI is divided into four tiers: very high human development (0.8-1.0), high human development (0.7-0.79), medium human development (0.55-.70) and low human development (below 0.55).
The top 10 countries with “very high” HDI scores are Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong (China), Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, The Netherlands and Denmark.
Those with the lowest scores are Niger, Central African Republic, Chad, Burundi, South Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone (tie), Mozambique and Eritrea.
The global Human Development Index value has declined for two years in a row in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Every year a few different countries experience dips in their respective Human Development Index values. But 90 percent of countries saw their index value drop in either 2020 or 2021, far exceeding the number that experienced reversals in the wake of the global financial crisis.
“We are living in uncertain times,” said UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner. “The world is fundamentally changing. There is no going back.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, now in its third year, continues to spin off new variants. The war in Ukraine reverberates throughout the world, causing immense human suffering, including a cost-of-living crisis.
UNDP’s Special Report on Human Security, launched earlier this year, found that six out of seven people worldwide reported feeling insecure about many aspects of their lives, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
