Belize drops on UNDP Human Development index
The Intelligence Economist Unit put Belize as murder capital number one while Transparency International gave Belize a black eye for corruption, placing the Jewel at the bottom of the scale at a hundred and eleven. Now comes the United Nations Development Program 2009 Human Development report and it is also giving Belize poor marks for the quality of life. With all the murders and scandals facing the country, Belize slipped two notches on the chart to ninety three. It says that the healthy life span of Belizeans is sixty-three and the unhealthy life expectancy is seventeen percent of the total life expectancy. But according to Kristine Blokhus, U.N.D.P. representative in Belize, it doesn’t necessarily mean that life is all bad.
Kristine Blokhus, U.N.D.P. Representative in Belize
“This kind of ranking always creates a lot of debate and in actual fact, it’s important to recognize a few things. The first is that the human development index does measure three things, which are very important. But those three things do not make up the full picture of what human development is. There are several things missing from the index in order to make it a complete measure. Some examples of very important things of human development that are not measured are, for example, political participation where Belize would score quite highly because it’s a democracy where political participation is free to everyone. Environmental degradation and environmental conservation are other measures that are very important to people’s quality of life and so Belize would also probably score very highly on that. That kind of thing is not measured so it’s important for us to recognize that it’s not a full measure of Belize’s development. There is a number of external forces that also impact on the ranking. For example, we’re also in the middle of a financial economic crisis so there are a number of measures that may be affected by the fact that, fro example, foreign direct investments have gone down or that Belize is a country that imports a lot and exchange rates may have an impact on GDP per capita for instance. So there’s a lot of things that come into this; more than what meets the eye initially. What we do hope is that the human development index ranking can instigate national debate on certain issues.”
According to the release, the country at number one with the world’s highest quality of life is Norway. Our Caribbean neighbor, Barbados is also listed at number thirty-seven in the section of the countries with very high human development.
