Global living standards are moving in the wrong direction

LIFE IN THE 2020s is tough. In most developed countries the pandemic created the biggest fall in life expectancy since the second world war. A deadly conflict in Ukraine is pushing up the cost of everything from energy to a loaf of bread. And amid all of the acute challenges, long-term ones have not gone away: climate change is a growing threat, as record droughts, heatwaves and floods in various parts of the world show.

To see just how tough, look at the UN’s latest Human Development Index (HDI), released on September 8th. The composite gauge of living standards—which includes measures of life expectancy, education and income per person—fell in 2021 for a second year running. It is the biggest consecutive decrease since the index was started in 1990, wiping out any gains since 2016 (see map).

The report makes grim reading. More than 80% of the 191 countries in the index registered a fall in HDI scores in 2021 compared with 2019, before the pandemic. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean fell furthest. In destitute Venezuela, for example, HDI scores have been falling since 2015 and accelerated their decline during the pandemic. Living standards also fell significantly in South Asia. In India—which endured a brutal covid lockdown—life expectancy fell by three years.

Worse still is the situation in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 32 countries with the lowest HDI scores, 28 were in this region. Many, such as South Sudan and Ethiopia, are enduring brutal conflicts. Such is the region’s poverty that a child born today can expect to live for 60 years and have just six years of schooling, compared with 79 and 12 years, respectively, in the OECD, a group of rich countries.

This drop in living standards undermines recent progress in some of the world’s poorest regions. Between 1990 and 2019 the HDI of the least-developed 46 countries grew nearly four times faster than those of OECD ones. In the past two years, the two groups have diverged. Things are unlikely to improve soon. Rampant inflation and climate change promise more bad news for much of the world. ■