Human Development and Regional Disparities in Iran: A Policy Model

Introduction

Measuring development has been a matter of debate for nearly half a century. The conventional
way of assessing development by economic indicators only has been challenged many times
during this period.¹

As early as 1954 a report by the United Nations on social policy and planning regarded
economic growth as a requirement for better living standards rather than the ultimate policy aim
(UN 1954). In 1969 experts on social policy and planning warned that “ The fact that
[economic] development either leaves behind, or in some ways even creates, large areas of
poverty, stagnation, marginality, and actual exclusion from economic and social progress is too
obvious and too urgent to be overlooked.” (UN 1969, p5). Nearly a decade later a group of
prominent scholars suspected that “... the economic growth by itself may not solve or even
alleviate the problem [ of poverty ] in any reasonable time period.” (Ahluwalia 1976, p1). Some
suggested that development should be seen as “... creating the conditions for realisation of
human potentiality” (Seers 1972). Others argued for a change in the objectives of development
programmes and proposed the satisfaction of basic needs as a replacement for purely
macroeconomic objectives (Hicks and Streeten 1979, Streeten et al. 1981) thus attempting to
move the emphasis towards human objectives.² The most important deficiency of the
traditional development economics was regarded to be its “concentration on national product,
aggregate income and total supply of particular goods rather than on entitlements of people and
the capabilities these entitlements generate.” (Sen 1984, p 496).

Such concerns resulted in searching for alternative measures of human welfare (development).³
The most recent attempt in constructing a measure of human development is the annual
publication of the Human Development Report (HDR) and Human Development Index (HDI)
by the UNDP which has been used for ranking countries since 1990. This index has been
favoured on the grounds that it shows the inadequacy of other indices such as GNP (Streeten
1994 and 1995).⁴ It has been preferred to per capita income as the latter neglects the
distributional aspects (Desai 1993) and it has been suggested that it “captures many aspects of
human development” (Haq 1995, p54).

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