Patterns of Potential Human Progress (PPHP)
The series will explore prospects for human development – how human development appears to be unfolding globally and locally, how we would like it to evolve, and how better to assure that we move it in desired directions. It was funded by Frederick S. Pardee and is a part of the Pardee Center for International Futures.
Each volume will be global, long-term, and integrated in perspective across a wide range of human development systems (i.e., demographic, economic, energy, agricultural, environmental, and socio-political systems). The first volume will focus on poverty reduction, recognized in the Millennium Development Goals to be the foundational human development goal. The next will look at the future of global education and the third will turn to prospects for global health.
| File Type | Size | |
|---|---|---|
| Reducing Global Poverty (draft) | 3,454 kb | |
| Improving Global Education (working paper) | 1,235 kb | |
| Enhancing Global Health (working paper) | 840 kb | |
| The IFs Team looks forward to your comments on these volumes. | ||
Volume 1: Reducing Global Poverty.
- This volume conveys and explores the most extensive set of forecasts of global poverty ever made. The forecasts are long-term, looking 50 years into the future. They are geographically rich, building up from the country level to continental sub-regions, continents as wholes, and to the world. With India the study even begins the necessary process of drilling down into countries. Full country detail is available in appendices to this volume and accompanying web postings.
- The forecasts are also very much contingent; they are scenarios not predictions. The volume supplements the Base Case forecast with framing scenarios to provide a sense of the outer boundaries of likely poverty futures. It presents intervention scenarios (individual and in packages) to explore the possible leverage that the global community has to incrementally shift the long-term patterns of poverty reduction.
- Finally, the study, while focusing very heavily on the specific measure of income poverty now at the center of global attention, namely $1 dollar per day, reaches well beyond that measure. It reports forecasts using other measures of income poverty, especially $2 per day, but also $5 and $10 per day. It provides some information on income poverty gaps and on relative, not just absolute poverty. Although more difficult and even more uncertain than income poverty forecasts, the study provides some information about human capabilities and functionings using the Human Poverty Index and Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program. For purposes of consistency across the facets of the analysis and because of limitations of space, the text discusses poverty primarily in terms of the $1 per day measure. Again, however, we invite readers to look at the appendices and supporting analyses for other measures.
Volume 2: Advancing Global Education.
- Even while widely recognized as fundamentally important, the educational attainment of peoples proves inadequate almost everywhere, especially across the developing world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, just 88 percent of the world’s children completed primary education, and in Middle Africa only 40 percent did so. In the same year, only 66 percent of children enrolled in secondary education globally, and the portion in Eastern Africa barely reached 20 percent. At the tertiary level, 21 percent of those of age enrolled world-wide, and the level was at or below 2 percent in countries as disparate as Afghanistan, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and Yemen. The gap between education for women and men remains stubbornly large – in South Asia, 55 percent of males enrolled in secondary education, but only 43 percent of females did so.
- World-wide in 2000, the average years of education attained by those 25-years of age and older reached only 6.6 years for men and 5.1 years for women. Although these numbers have increased by nearly 2 years since 1960, it is appalling that the average education of global adults remains essentially at the level of primary completion and that it is so unequally distributed.
- Within an environment with so many areas of need and of constrained resources, how can the governments of developing countries best advance human development through education? How much emphasis should societies place on education relative to basic health care, housing, or infrastructure? What relative emphases on primary, secondary, and tertiary education, over varying time frames, most increase people’s capabilities and the opportunities for these capabilities to be expressed? The answers to these and other questions about education within a human development framework are not necessarily intuitive.
Volume 3: Enhancing Global Health.
- Health lies at the heart of all human development forecasts. At base, political, social, and economic decisions reflect the wish of individuals to live long, comfortable lives. In this spirit, we attempt to address three essential questions: 1) What health outcomes should we expect given current patterns in human development; 2) What opportunities exist for intervention and the achievement of alternate health futures; and 3) How might investments in health change economic, social, and political prospects?
Volume 4: Infrastructure and Governance in Human Development.
- [coming soon]
Volume 5: Energy, environment and development.
- [coming soon]