EXPRESSING alarm that half of the world’s poorest countries have been knocked backwards in their social and economic development rankings after steep declines during 2020 and 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic reigned, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says the resulting “gridlock…must be urgently tackled through collective action”.

In its 2023/24 Human Development Report (HDR), titled ‘Breaking the Gridlock: Reimagining cooperation in a polarized world’, officially released on Wednesday, the UNDP said, “the rebound in the global Human Development Index (HDI) — a summary measure reflecting a country’s Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, education, and life expectancy — has been partial, incomplete, and unequal”.

The UNDP said while the HDI is projected to reach record highs in 2023 after steep declines during 2020 and 2021, “this progress is deeply uneven”.

“Rich countries are experiencing record-high levels of human development while half of the world’s poorest countries remain below their pre-crisis level of progress. Global inequalities are compounded by substantial economic concentration,” the UNDP said referencing the findings of the report which showed that almost 40 per cent of global trade in goods is concentrated in three or fewer countries. It pointed out further that in 2021 the market capitalisation of each of the three largest tech companies in the world surpassed the gross domestic product (GDP) of more than 90 per cent of countries that year.

“The widening human development gap revealed by the report shows that the two-decade trend of steadily reducing inequalities between wealthy and poor nations is now in reverse. Despite our deeply interconnected global societies, we are falling short. We must leverage our interdependence as well as our capacities to address our shared and existential challenges and ensure people’s aspirations are met,” said Achim Steiner, head of the UN Development Programme, in a statement issued by the UNDP on Wednesday.

“This gridlock carries a significant human toll. The failure of collective action to advance action on climate change, digitalization or poverty and inequality not only hinders human development but also worsens polarization and further erodes trust in people and institutions worldwide,” he added.

In the meantime, a UNDP representative, in addressing the findings of the report in a briefing held on Tuesday ahead of the official unveiling, expressed concern about the vulnerability of Latin America and the Caribbean to shocks including the most recent the pandemic as against other regions.

“Latin America and the Caribbean noticed significant depletion in human development two years in a row from 0.768 to 0.754, meaning a significant reduction. We have proven that we are not as resilient. Our capacity in recovering from the shocks that we have experienced in terms of human development is not resilient enough in order to recover that place we were at in 2019,” the representative noted.

“The Caribbean and Latin America have experienced recovery; however, we were not able to surpass the levels in terms of human development before the pandemic. So it is imperative, it is crucial to exceed those averages. Behind averages we find all those deep inequalities,” she said further.

In noting that on a country level only 12 countries have been able to recover themselves or recover to pre-pandemic levels,the UNDP representative said 21 countries in the region have not been able to meet those numbers.

“They are below the pre-pandemic levels lives have been lost, gaps in education and learning and many other aspects. If we go beyond those averages in sub-regions and we can take for example the case of the English-speaking Caribbean, we see a trend full of contrast and inequalities in the realities of countries with four English-speaking countries that have been able to overcome the shock of the pandemic and surpass their levels but many of them haven’t been able to,” the UNDP official noted.

In the meantime, the UNDP said Jamaica’s HDI value for 2022 stood at 0.706, which “put the country in the High Human Development Category — positioning it at 115 out of 193 countries and territories”.

Last March, the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) indicated that Jamaica’s economy had expanded by 3.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2022, signalling the country’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Minister of Finance and the Public Service Dr Nigel Clarke commenting at the time said that data signalled that Jamaica not only achieved but surpassed pre-COVID levels of growth, one fiscal year ahead of projections.

The HDI is a tool developed by the United Nations to measure and rank countries’ levels of social and economic development. It is an indicator of social standards that consists of three areas: life expectancy, access to education and literacy, and living conditions and income.