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57-734: In 1995 in the Human Development Report commissioned by the United Nations Development Program set-out to create two new measurement indices for measuring development. Their aim was to add to the Human Development Index by way of including a gender dimension in the measure. They were created in order to rival the traditional income-focused measures of development such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and

114-580: A disproportionate amount of wealth , privilege , political power , or skill in a group. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary , the "elite" are "the richest, most powerful, best-educated, or best-trained group in a society". American sociologist C. Wright Mills states that members of the elite accept their fellows' position of importance in society. "As a rule, 'they accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work, and to think, if not together at least alike'." It

171-402: A component regarding women's control over their own bodies and sexuality be added by measuring the availability of birth control and the right to abortion. In fact, some have suggested that there is not enough consideration of women's health as a whole in the current GEM. It has been suggested that including infant mortality rate of females (IMR-F) and maternal mortality rate (MMR) be included in

228-469: A country's carbon dioxide emissions and material footprint. In his foreword to the report, UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said that "humans wield more power over the planet than ever before. In the wake of COVID-19, record-breaking temperatures and spiraling inequality, it is time to use that power to redefine what we mean by progress, where our carbon and consumption footprints are no longer hidden." Numerous highly developed wealthy countries plummeted as

285-411: A hypothetical alternative, stating that these elite individuals would consider themselves the overseers of the national economy. Also appreciating that it is not only a moral, but a practical necessity to focus beyond their group interests. Doing so would hopefully alleviate various destructive conditions affecting large numbers of less affluent citizens. Mills determined that there is an "inner core" of

342-485: A result of their environmental impact, such as the United States, which dropped 45 places. By contrast, countries with lighter footprints such as Costa Rica, Moldova and Panama move up the index by roughly 30 places. Source: Elite In political and sociological theory, the elite ( French : élite , from Latin : eligere , to select or to sort out) are a small group of powerful people who hold

399-476: A single measure. The concern then arises that if these indices are not well-informed, then their numbers might hide more than they reveal. In terms of the GEM in particular, it is often said to represent an elite bias. It has been accused of measuring inequality only among the most educated and economically advantaged women and to focus mainly on the higher echelons of society. Women in grassroots organizations or at

456-580: A white elite, emerged. According to the London School of Economics (LSE): "The dominant elite in the South before the Civil War were the wealthy landowners who held people in slavery, the so-called "planter class". Their influence in politics before the war can best be illustrated by highlighting that of the 15 presidents before Abraham Lincoln, eight held people as slaves while in office." While

513-437: Is a measure of average achievement in the basic dimensions of human development across countries, and a compendium of key development statistics relevant to the report theme. The Human Development Reports have an extensive influence on the development debate worldwide. They have also inspired national and regional analyses which, by their nature, usually address issues that are more country – or regionally – specific. The report

570-539: Is a well-regulated existence where education plays a critical role. As European settlers began to colonize the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, they quickly realized the economic potential of growing cash crops which were in high demand in Europe. Owned by the planter class , plantations, large-scale farms where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for

627-444: Is agricultural wages and employment. Agriculture accounts for a large share of women's employment in the developing world. To account for this in the GEM, West Bengal's 2004 HDR, for example, includes rural agricultural employment in its GEM calculations, whereas typically a GEM equation would only include non-agricultural wages. This alteration allows for a more representative and accurate GEM. Suggestions have also been made to replace

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684-626: Is another suggested alternative to the GEM, this measure would include a legal framework and protection of women's rights, as well as other important areas of women's empowerment that are overlooked by the GEM like women's movements, public attitudes, and equal rights. Lastly, in the 2010 Human Development Report , a new measuring mechanism was created entitled the Gender Inequality Index . This new experimental measure considers three dimensions: Reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation which aim to ameliorate some of

741-714: Is correlated with higher smoking levels among women, much closer to that of the men in their country. As time passes, and these measures (the GDI and the GEM) are applied year after year, debate has arisen over whether or not they have been as influential in promoting gender-sensitive development as was hoped when they were first created. Some of the major criticisms of both measures include that they are highly specialized and difficult to interpret, often misinterpreted, suffer from large data gaps, do not provide accurate comparisons across countries, and try to combine too many development factors into

798-430: Is extraordinarily unequal and that this is a major driver for the movement of people. The 2010 Human Development Report—The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development—showed through a detailed new analysis of long-term Human Development Index (HDI) trends that most developing countries made dramatic yet often underestimated progress in health, education and basic living standards in recent decades, with many of

855-494: Is no automatic link between economic growth and human progress." The 2010 Report's rigorous review of longer-term trends—looking back at HDI indicators for most countries from 1970—showed there is no consistent correlation between national economic performance and achievement in the non-income HDI areas of health and education. Overall, as shown in the Report's analysis of all countries for which complete HDI data are available for

912-485: The Gender Inequality Index , and the Multidimensional Poverty Index . Each Report has its own focus drawn from contemporary debate. The 2009 Human Development Report, Overcoming Barriers , focused on migration – both within and beyond borders. It was chosen because it is a prominent theme in domestic and international debates. Its starting point is that the global distribution of capabilities

969-699: The Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GEM, the more specialized of the two, is focused on indicating the relative empowerment of women in a given country. The GEM was designed to measure "whether women and men are able to actively participate in economic and political life and take part in decision-making" (UNDP, 1995, p. 73)(Klasen 257). The GEM tends to be more agency-focused (what people are actually able to do) than well-being-focused (how people feel or fare in

1026-659: The Gross National Product (GNP). Mahbub ul Haq , the first director of the Human Development Report Office, established several principles for the newly emerging measure including provisions that it had to be simple, had to be represented as a single number, had to be easily calculated, had to yield numbers that were internationally comparable, had to use numbers available on a yearly basis and had to use numbers that were easily interpretable. The resulting measures that were created were

1083-532: The Ivy League , which includes Harvard University , Yale University , Columbia University and Princeton University (among others), and the universities' respective highly exclusive clubs, such as the Harvard Club of Boston . These memberships in turn pave the way to the prominent social clubs located in major cities and serve as sites for important business contacts. According to Mills, men receive

1140-525: The elite theory in his 1929 work, Imperialism and World Economy : "present-day state power is nothing but an entrepreneurs' company of tremendous power, headed even by the same persons that occupy the leading positions in the banking and syndicate offices". The power elite is a term used by Mills to describe a relatively small, loosely connected group of individuals who dominate American policymaking. This group includes bureaucratic, corporate, intellectual, military, media , and government elites who control

1197-494: The first report in 1990. "The basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. This may appear to be a simple truth. But it is often forgotten in the immediate concern with the accumulation of commodities and financial wealth." The United Nations General Assembly has formally recognized the Report as "an independent intellectual exercise" and "an important tool for raising awareness about human development around

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1254-539: The Civil War ended slavery, the former planter class kept control over their land, and thus, they also remained politically influential. As stated by the LSE, "this persistence in "de facto power" in turn allowed them to block economic reforms, disenfranchise Black voters, and restrict the mobility of workers." Youthful upper-class members attend prominent preparatory schools, which open doors to elite universities, known as

1311-603: The GEM as a whole. One such suggestion is the calculation of separate Human Development Indexes for males and females which would provide a more straightforward picture of gender inequality (first suggested by Halis Akder in 1994). Another suggestion is to create a Gender-Gap Measure. In 2003 Charmes and Wieringa came up with the Women's Empowerment Matrix which considers six spheres (physical, sociocultural, religious, political, legal and economic) as well as six levels: individual, household, community, state, regional, and global. The GEE

1368-489: The GEM has been employed is as a metric in academic research on comparative gender politics. For example, a study by Dr. Michael M.O. Seipel used the GEM to test the hypothesis that countries with less female representation in government will have spending rates that reflect more traditionally masculine values than do countries with more equal gender representation. Seiple took higher GEM to indicate more female representation in government. The study found that Seipel's hypothesis

1425-488: The GEM in a study they conducted at the University of Waterloo entitled " Gender empowerment and female-to-male smoking prevalence ratios ". Employing the GEM as their metric for a country's level of gender empowerment, they found that, as countries increase in gender empowerment, the gap in smoking rates between men and women shrinks. While countries with low GEM ratings see far more men than women smoke, higher empowerment

1482-407: The GEM's "secular bias." Furthermore, statistical information (data) is not very readily available for many of the indicators in the GEM. Not many less-developed countries collect reliable data on women's involvement in economic participation or labor involvement. As a result, the GEM is only reliable for very highly developed countries which do collect those statistics. It is also often argued that

1539-785: The HDI tradition of measurement innovation by introducing new indices that address crucial development factors not directly reflected in the HDI: The 2020 report asserts that immense human pressures on the planet have ushered in a new geological epoch , the Anthropocene , or the Age of Humans. As such, the report introduces a new index to account for these pressures, the Planetary-Pressures Adjusted Human Development Index (PHDI), which includes

1596-442: The benefits from economic growth". Castells cites a kind of "double movement" where on one hand, "valuable segments of territories and people" become "linked in the global networks of value making and wealth appropriation", while, on the other, "everything and everyone" that is not valued by established networks gets "switched off...and ultimately discarded". These evolutions have also led many social scientists to explore empirically

1653-517: The calculations, as they are better suited to indicate women's health and lifecycle than is the more general life expectancy at birth (LEB) measure. It has also been suggested that the GEM could be altered to include the proportion of females who are in extreme poverty as opposed to the proportion of parliamentary positions held by females. Lastly, it has been suggested that the GEM could be altered to include female levels of unemployment. Other suggestions include coming up with different ways to deal with

1710-402: The differences in the two terms: "The upper class as a whole does not do the ruling. Instead, class rule is manifested through the activities of a wide variety of organizations and institutions...Leaders within the upper class join with high-level employees in the organizations they control to make up what will be called the power elite". The Marxist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin anticipated

1767-655: The earned income part so as to make it a more straightforward mode of measurement. In some developing countries where the aforementioned shortcomings of the GEM are especially pronounced, subnational calculations are made differently in order to produce a more accurate representation of women's empowerment. For example, while the number of women in national Indian parliament may be slim, there are more women in local-level government who would be unaccounted for. Thus many Indian states use local level parliamentary numbers when calculating their GEM and overall Human Development Reports (HDR). Another example of these local-level alterations

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1824-538: The education necessary for elitist privilege to obtain their background and contacts, allowing them to enter three branches of the power elite, which are: According to Mills, the governing elite in the United States primarily draws its members from political leaders, including the president, and a handful of key cabinet members, as well as close advisers, major corporate owners and directors, and high-ranking military officers. These groups overlap and elites tend to circulate from one sector to another, consolidating power in

1881-542: The grand scheme of things). The GEM is determined using three basic indicators: Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments, percentage of women in economic decision making positions (incl. administrative, managerial, professional and technical occupations) and female share of income (earned incomes of males vs. females). The GEM is thought to be a valuable policy instrument because it allows certain dimensions that were previously difficult to compare between countries to come into international comparison . One way

1938-596: The human development approach, which places people at the center of the development process. The reports are ensured of editorial independence by the United Nations General Assembly . They are seen as reports to UNDP, not of UNDP. This allows each report greater freedom to explore ideas and constructively challenge policies. Each report also presents an updated set of indices, including the Human Development Index (HDI), which

1995-406: The local political level are not reflected, as well as work in lower levels of employment or in the informal sector, where many women in poor and developing countries are forced to seek employment. Additionally, the GEM has been criticized for not taking into account the limitations on or differences in women's empowerment within certain religious and cultural contexts. Professor Jawad Syed calls this

2052-404: The more reliable sources of data in the measure. Another criticism of the GEM is its failure to address the issue of female control over their bodies and sexuality, which some argue is an important source of female empowerment and as such should be included in the measure. Additionally, the GEM has also been criticized for being far too dependent on the income component of the measure for determining

2109-416: The number of women in parliament isn't an adequate indication of gender empowerment progress in a given country because many times feminists are considered political liabilities, and as such, female politicians do not always promote female interests. On the other hand, however, information regarding the number of parliamentary seats held by women is very easy to obtain, and very hard to alter, making it one of

2166-412: The overall GEM score. Many suggestions have been made to alter the GEM. It has been suggested that the GEM be altered to include female representation in local government instead of only national government to make it less elite. Furthermore, it has been recommended that it should be revised to reflect female participation in political activities such as voting. Additionally, it has been recommended that

2223-547: The past 40 years, life expectancy climbed from 59 years in 1970 to 70 in 2010, school enrollment rose from just 55 percent of all primary and secondary school-age children to 70 percent, and per capita GDP doubled to more than US$ 10,000. People in all regions shared in this progress, though to varying degrees. Life expectancy, for example, rose by 18 years in the Arab states between 1970 and 2010, compared to eight years in sub-Saharan Africa. The 135 countries studied include 92 percent of

2280-513: The poorest countries posting the greatest gains. In the 2010 Report, the Sultanate of Oman was reported to be the most improved country in the past 40 years out of the 135 countries assessed (the report reported on improvement in the period 1970–2010). Oman's strides in education, women empowerment and health care under the patronage of the current Sultan of Oman led to it securing the 1st position. Several new indices have been introduced over

2337-401: The poorest countries posting the greatest gains. Yet patterns of achievement vary greatly, with some countries losing ground since 1970, the 2010 Human Development Report shows. Introducing three new indices, the 20th anniversary edition of the report documented wide inequalities within and among countries, deep disparities between women and men on a wide range of development indicators, and

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2394-556: The power elite into complex relationships with nation states that generate global-scale class divisions. Sociologist Manuel Castells writes in The Rise of the Network Society that contemporary globalization does not mean that "everything in the global economy is global". So, a global economy becomes characterized by fundamental social inequalities with respect to the "level of integration, competitive potential and share of

2451-412: The power elite involving individuals that are able to move from one seat of institutional power to another. They, therefore, have a wide range of knowledge and interests in many influential organizations, and are, as Mills describes, "professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs". Relentless expansion of capitalism and the globalizing of economic and military power bind leaders of

2508-484: The prevalence of extreme multidimensional poverty in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The new report also included a change in the methodology used to calculate the indexes using better statistical methods, as well as new parameters for judging the growth and development. The first Human Development Report introduced its pioneering HDI and analyzed previous decades of development indicators, concluding that "there

2565-474: The principal institutions in the United States and whose opinions and actions influence the decisions of the policymakers. The basis for membership of a power elite is institutional power, namely an influential position within a prominent private or public organization. A study of the French corporate elite has shown that social class continues to hold sway in determining who joins this elite group, with those from

2622-629: The problems associated with the GEM. Human Development Report The Human Development Report ( HDR ) is an annual Human Development Index report published by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The first HDR was launched in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen . Since then reports have been released most years, and have explored different themes through

2679-465: The process. Unlike the ruling class , a social formation based on heritage and social ties, the power elite is characterized by the organizational structures through which its wealth is acquired. According to Mills, the power elite rose from "the managerial reorganization of the propertied classes into the more or less unified stratum of the corporate rich". In G. William Domhoff ’s sociology textbooks, Who Rules America? editions, he further clarified

2736-460: The ten-volume Arab Human Development Report series, which have made internationally recognized contributions to the global dialogue on democracy , women's rights, inequality, poverty eradication and other critical issues. The 2010 Human Development Report 's review of human development trends showed that most developing countries made dramatic yet often underestimated progress in health, education and basic living standards since 1970 with many of

2793-469: The upper-middle class tending to dominate. Another study (published in 2002) of power elites in the United States during the administration of President George W. Bush (in office from 2001 to 2009) identified 7,314 institutional positions of power encompassing 5,778 individuals. A later study of U.S. society noted demographic characteristics of this elite group as follows: In the 1970s an organized set of policies promoted reduced taxes , especially for

2850-425: The wealthy, and a steady erosion of the welfare safety net. Starting with legislation in the 1980s, the wealthy banking community successfully lobbied for reduced regulation. The wide range of financial and social capital accessible to the power elite gives their members heavy influence in economic and political decision making, allowing them to move toward attaining desired outcomes. Sociologist Christopher Doob gives

2907-401: The world's population. The "Top 10 Movers" highlighted in the 2010 Report—those countries among the 135 that improved most in HDI terms over the past 40 years—were led by Oman, which invested energy earnings over the decades in education and public health. The other nine " Top Movers " are China, Nepal, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Laos, Tunisia, South Korea, Algeria and Morocco. Remarkably, China

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2964-420: The world. "Cross-national reports of housework: An investigation of the gender empowerment measure" concludes that the GEM and the elements that comprise it are key to understanding the proportional breakdown of housework between men and women. However, the total GEM and its compositional elements, Ruppanner warns, are not to be used interchangeably. In 2011, Professors Sara C. Hitchman and Geoffrey T. Fong used

3021-760: The world." The Human Development Report is an independent report, commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and is the product of a selected team of leading scholars, development practitioners and members of the Human Development Report Office of UNDP. It is a report independent of the Administrator of the UNDP, as suggested by Mahbub ul Haq. It is translated into numerous languages and launched in more than 100 countries annually. Since 1990, more than 140 countries have published some 600 national Human Development Reports, with UNDP support. UNDP has also sponsored scores of regional reports, such as

3078-664: The years in different reports, including the Human Development Index , the Gender-related Development Index , the Gender Empowerment Measure , the Human Poverty Index . The Gender-related Development Index , the Gender Empowerment Measure and the Human Poverty Index were removed in 2010. The 2010 Human Development Report introduced three new indices the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index ,

3135-477: Was correct: the higher a country's GEM score, the higher its rate of spending on domestic programs like education and health care, which are correlated with traditional feminine values. Inversely, countries with low GEM scores had higher rates of military spending, which correlate with traditional masculine values. Professor Leah E. Ruppanner used the 2004 GEM in to study the relationship between women's empowerment and women's share of housework in countries around

3192-474: Was first launched in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen . Its goal was to place people at the center of the development process in terms of economic debate, policy and advocacy. Development was characterized by the provision of choices and freedoms resulting in widespread outcomes. "People are the real wealth of a nation," Haq wrote in the opening lines of

3249-498: Was the only country that made the "Top 10" list due solely to income performance; the main drivers of HDI achievement were in health and education. The next 10 leaders in HDI improvement over the past 40 years include several low-income but high HID-achieving countries "not typically described as success stories," the Report notes, among them Ethiopia (#11), Cambodia (#15) and Benin (#18)—all of which made big gains in education and public health. The 2010 Human Development Report continued

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