PH ranking in UN human dev’t index down

Despite posting marginal gain in the United Nations’ index measuring three basic dimensions of human development partly due to the effective implementation of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, the Philippines’ global ranking slipped by one notch to 116th out of 188 countries.

The latest Human Development Report 2016 of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) showed that the Philippines’ human development index (HDI) in 2015 rose to 0.682 from 0.668 in 2014.

A country note on the Philippines defined the HDI as “a summary measure for assessing progress in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living.”

The Philippines’ ranking in the 2016 report, however, went down to 116th from 115th in the 2015 report.

The country was included among those with “medium” human development.

The last 15 years showed improvement in the country’s HDI score, although below the average in the region.

“The Philippines’ 2015 HDI of 0.682 is above the average of 0.631 for countries in the medium human development group and below the average of 0.720 for countries in East Asia and the Pacific. From East Asia and the Pacific, countries which are close to Philippines in 2015 HDI rank and to some extent in population size are Indonesia and Thailand,” the country note said.

For the period 1990 to 2015, the Philippines’ HDI rose from 0.586 to 0.682, or up 16.3 percent, it added. “Between 1990 and 2015, the Philippines’ life expectancy at birth increased by three years, mean years of schooling increased by 2.7 years and expected years of schooling increased by 0.9 years. The Philippines’ gross national income per capita increased by about 111.9 percent between 1990 and 2015.”

In the report, the UNDP cited the effectiveness of the Philippines’ local CCT program.

“The conditional cash transfer program in the Philippines reached 4.4 million families in 2015, covering 21 percent of the population; 82 percent of the benefits went to the poorest 40 percent of the population,” the report said.