Pardee Center Hosts Meeting on Measuring Progress in Human Development

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future on April 10  hosted a lunch meeting of a dozen experts and practitioners who discussed how to best measure progress in human development.

The gathering was organized by Pardee Post-Doctoral Fellow Suranjana Nabar-Bhaduri and Visiting Faculty Fellow John Hammock, who is also co-founder of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University.

The group discussed the shortcomings of using purely economic indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), income-based indices, and various other country financial indices, to judge the overall well-being of citizens of a country or region.  The conversation focused on the need for multi-dimensional measures of development, such as the Oxford Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, and others that incorporate indicators such as infant mortality rates and average educational levels to get a more complete picture of levels of development in a country or region. The discussion also touched on the political, ethical, and technical aspects that need to be considered in developing and employing specific metrics.

The meeting was the first in a series of programmatic activities that the Pardee Center will sponsor exploring how traditional measures of progress in human development have evolved recently and may change in the future. This effort follows a Pardee Paper published in 2009 titled “Beyond GDP: The Need for New Measures of Progress.”

Pardee Center Director ad interim Jim McCann participated in the meeting, along with Programs Manager Cynthia Barakatt.

Other meeting participants included:

Kehinde Ajayi, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Boston University

Gabriel Ferrero, Senior Policy Advisor, UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, New York

Maureen Hart, President, Sustainable Measures Inc.

Ann Helwege, Visiting Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, Boston University; Senior Research Fellow, Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University

Brian Jenkin, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Religion, Boston University, and 2011 Pardee Graduate Summer Fellow

Maliha Khan, Director, Learning, Evaluation and Accountability Department, Oxfam America

Megan Rounseville , Graduate Student, Fletcher School, Tufts University

Rajesh Sampath, Assistant Professor, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University

Isabella Wedl, Visiting Doctoral Scholar, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany

Follow up activities related to this meeting will be scheduled in Fall 2012.