• Growing Migration Inequality: What do the Global Data Actually Show?

World Migration Report 2024: Chapter 4

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Chapter 4
Growing Migration Inequality: What do the Global Data Actually Show?

Appendix A. Opportunity, migration and the Human Development Index

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The Human Development Index (HDI), as published annually in the UNDP’s Human Development Report, is premised on the view that people are not generally driven by a singular desire to gain increased income, but instead puts forward the idea that people seek the “capabilities to exercise their freedoms to be and do what they aspire to in life”.77 Grounded in the work of Amartya Sen and developed by Mahbub ul Haq, the HDI takes a “a people-centred view” by incorporating three streams of data, each representing some of the basic opportunities conducive to expanding human capabilities.78 First, the education of a country or a subnational jurisdiction is measured, mostly in terms of years of schooling for children. Second, health is measured by the life expectancy of a child at birth. Third, the HDI utilizes an economic indicator, represented by the average income measured in the context of the local currency (purchasing power parity or PPP). By integrating these three categories into a single index, the HDI seeks to obtain a more nuanced perspective of the qualities that contribute to individual and collective well-being in a society.

The HDI’s limitations are well known. Reducing the index to health and education, and then quantifying these categories based on a limited series of variables, can risk oversimplification. The classification system – the numerical cut-offs for determining country’s level of development – can be perceived as arbitrary. Most pointedly, the HDI can be politicized, as some countries make concerted pushes to receive superior scores on one or more of the indicators. 79 However, economic indices are prone to worse sorts of manipulation, as most recently evidenced by the suspension and review of the World Bank’s Doing Business Report, an annual overview that features an index of business regulations and economic factors, but which has been criticized for methodological irregularities and for neglecting the role of social protection systems in human development.80

The use of the HDI in this chapter recognizes, first, that the introduction of numerous variables does not inevitably lead to a more accurate representation of development. The simplicity of the HDI is one of its virtues. Second, regarding the classification systems, while these can sometimes be found to be arbitrary, they do help the human mind to conceptualize patterns in development.81 Finally, while the politicization of the HDI is inevitable, it remains an index of record for journalists, scholars and policymakers alike to provide an accurate measure for understanding the opportunities available to people around the world.82

The 2009 edition of the Human Development Report featured a thematic focus on migration, remarking, “better policies towards human mobility can enhance human development”.83 From an HDI perspective, the decision to migrate does not rest solely on the realization of greater incomes, or as an investment for future potential earnings. Migration, instead, is a strategy engaged to secure access to some of the basic goods – health and education – that lead to increased opportunities for oneself and one’s children. Notwithstanding the attempt at quantifying global internal migration, a fraught exercise given the definitional vagaries and the paucity of reliable migration event data, the Human Development Report 2009 demonstrated that migration can be analysed in the context of a wider set of variables and that doing so can result in robust evidence for migration with policy implications.