United Nations Human Development Report and the Need for International

United Nations Human Development Report and the Need for International Democratization The 2002 United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR) is the result of many years’ study of international human progress and development. As declared in the first page of the report, "[This report] is about how political power and institutions, formal and informal, national and international, shape human progress". This statement outlines the principal theme of power dynamics and fragmentation (politics) on varying levels, public and private, rich and poor, male and female, etc. - that runs consistently throughout the work, analyzing global trends of political participation and democracy. According to the UNHDR, human development is politically determined, not only socially and economically so as represented in many studies. The Report operates under the basic assumption that the current world is more free and more just than ever before, but that democracy (including structures of political participation, economic justice, health and education, and peace and personal security) is necessary to improve human development and to protect the freedom and dignity of all people. Although the Report is outwardly concerned with all democratic countries, industrialized or not, it is most significant to developing democracies where necessary reforms in human development have not yet been realized. As expressed by lead author, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, this year’s Report emphasizes the growing divisions between "those who prosper... and those who do not... between the powerful and the powerless, between those who welcome the new global economy and those who demand a different course." At times it seems as though both sufficient coherence and evide... ... whole the UNHDR does an thorough job at citing the important role of democratic governance with regard to human development, it also was blind to one major issue: the difference between theoretical and practical democracy. The successful theoretical democracy primarily discussed in this Report is undoubtedly not the same democracy practiced by 82 "fully democratic" countries in the world.Although the Report does make note of the susceptibility of many democratic institutions to corruption and inequality, the point was not made clear enough that these are two very separate and distinct forms of democracy. No matter the stylistic flaws, though, this Report truly creates a clear perspective on the state of current international human development, and rightfully emphasizes the immediate need for foreign aid, improved living standards, and international democratization.

Class mobility

Classes have been studied under five classifications and similarly castes have classified under eight categories and both are socially viable. Absolute mobility has been used to study intergenerational social mobility and after allowing for structural changes, relative mobility has been analyzed by using odds ratio. Finally to study the effect of castes/community on social mobility logistic regression have been used with access to salariat class destination as dependent variable and class origins and castes as independent variables.To look t the trends over time, five year birth cohort data have been used with focus on father's occupation to avoid any impact of life-cycle process. Since India has gone through various social economic changes over years, like a capitalist country it is expected to become more open with greater equality of opportunities after liberalization of post 1980s. Therefore, equality of opportunity should rise along with a rise in absolute mobility. Discussion t o patterns of intergenerational mobility of men and women is limited only to paid employment.Paper pointed out that proportion of Indian labour in trade, manufacture and services has risen but the largest workforce participation still remains in agriculture. There has been an increasing room at the top and agricultural workers and farmer's participation has declined over time. More women as compared to men remain in agricultural occupations. Also, the occupational change has been there prior to liberalization. Therefore, we do not see any impact of modernization in the changing occupational patterns.Crosstabs of NES data between classes of father and respondent clearly shows a stable intergenerational society for both men and women. A trend analysis of absolute mobility shows decreasing upward mobility and increasing downward mobility as opposed to our hypothesis. Trends in inequality of opportunity calculated by using odds ratio and then by log linear model (appropriate way to test for increasing fluidity) shows a clear pattern of increasing inequality of opportunity both in agriculture and informal sector but grater in farming sector.A higher odds ratio of armer: salariat than manual: salariat ratio points out some sectoral barriers in addition to class barriers. Also, the movement between farming and salariat Jobs is harder for women. Overall there has been little demonstrable increase in equality of opportunity in Indian society. When the impact of castes was analysed is was seen that by using the logit regression and recoding castes in eight distinctive categories no clear trend could be observed for both men and women. Rather the father's class nas been a strong determining tactor tor access to salaried class destinations.Surprisingly India which is a caste based society and policies of reservation are also based on castes, it is the class which determines the upward social mobility. Caste reservation does not seen to have benefitted the SCS and STs as m ight have been hoped. CRITIC The paper in the beginning explained various modernization theses and asking research questions based on demand and supply side issues. It was said that we explore these various possibilities in remainder of the chapter. But the whole focus was concentrated only on class and lastly caste analyses.Competitive market, formalized recruitment procedure and equality of condition were not incorporated as results of modernization as per my understanding. I am not aware though if such a method is possible. Secondly, not undertaking the marital social mobility of women has been considered a limitation in the study but since the paper looks at the social mobility in terms of access to salarit Jobs, marriage of a women to a higher class individual than her father does indicate a net upward social mobility of her living tandard but not her chances of getting a better Job.Even if this argument doen't sounds good then a social mobility through marriage is not in any c ase an indicator of modernization of society. Lastly, in the birth cohort method, one has to self calculated roughly where exactly the period of liberalization has been shown on the table or graph. Since our focus is on modernization, had there been a mention of period of liberalization along the birth years it would have been easy to anlyze the changes before and after the liberalization.

Brigadier General John C. Caldwell in the Civil War