Timor-Leste declines in Human Development Rankings

By Charles Scheiner, La’o Hamutuk
6 December 2007

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) issues a Human Development Report every year. The 2007/2008 edition, published on 27 November 2007, is entitled “Fighting climate change: human solidarity in a divided world.” In addition to the thematic discussion and a wealth of statistical data on health, education, economics and other factors, the UNDP calculates a “Human Development Index” (HDI) for each country. The HDI combines life expectancy, education (literacy and school enrollment) and income to produce a composite measure of human development.

In the 2007/2008 report, which is mostly based on data from 2005, the HDI for Timor-Leste is 0.514. Timor-Leste ranks 150th of 177 countries with data. Except for Yemen and several countries in Africa, this is the lowest in the world.

Since last year, Timor-Leste’s human development index has risen slightly but its rank has dropped, falling below Madagascar, Cameroon, Swaziland, Djibouti, Lesotho, Kenya, Mauritania and Haiti in the rankings. Last year's 2006 UNDP Human Development Report, based on 2004 data, calculated Timor-Leste’s HDI as 0.512, ranking 142 out of 177, down from 140 the previous year, which was the first time the HDR included statistics about Timor-Leste. The principal reason for the decline is the Adult Literacy statistic, which dropped from 58.6% (rank 110) in 2004 to 50.1% (rank 123) in 2005, a change which probably reflects inconsistencies in data rather than people forgetting how to read.

The complete 2007/8 UNDP Human Development Report and related information are available from http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-2008/. A discussion of poverty and climate change in relation to Timor-Leste is at http://hdrstats.undp.org/countries/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_TMP.html.

The following statistical information for Timor-Leste is from the UNDP 2007/8 Human Development Report. In most cases, the information was collected in 2005. The link from each item will take you to that statistic for all countries. For reference, we have also included the values from the previous year. In a few cases, the numbers make no sense or changes from year to year seem unreasonable, but these figures are what was reported by UNDP.