MANAMA: Economic growth does not always result in social progress, according to a major new global index, the Social Progress Index.
The Index was published by the nonprofit Social Progress Imperative, and released last week at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.
For Middle East countries in the 2014 Social Progress Index , the UAE ranks 37th followed closely by Kuwait in the 40th position, Saudi Arabia 65th, Jordan 75th, Lebanon 83rd, Egypt 84th, Iraq 118th and Yemen 125th. Among the 132 countries rankings, the top 5 are: New Zealand, Switzerland, Iceland, Netherlands and Norway.
The Social Progress Index 2014 ranks 132 countries based on their social and environmental performance. Higher GDP per capita does bring benefits, particularly on ‘Basic Human Needs’ but rising incomes do not guarantee improvement on ‘Ecosystem Sustainability’, ‘Health and Wellness’ and ‘Opportunity’.
The Social Progress Index, created by a team led by Professor Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School, is designed as a complement to GDP and other economic indicators to provide a more holistic understanding of countries’ overall performance.
“Until now, the assumption has been that there is a direct relationship between economic growth and wellbeing. However, the Social Progress Index finds that all economic growth is not equal. While higher GDP per capita is correlated with social progress, the connection is far from automatic. For similar levels of GDP, we find that some countries achieve much higher levels of social progress than others,” Professor Michael E. Porter said.
“Deloitte is collaborating globally with the Social Progress Imperative and others because we believe business has a role to play in helping address and solve the world’s critical issues and the Index is a tool that can ignite collective action from business, government and society,” Omar Fahoum, chairman and chief executive of Deloitte Middle East, said.
The Social Progress Index does show a broad positive correlation between economic performance, (measured in GDP per capita) and social progress. Countries with higher incomes tend to enjoy greater social progress: New Zealand ($25,858 *GDP per capita) ranks highest in the Index while Chad ($1,870* GDP per capita) ranks lowest.
For lower income countries, economic growth will not necessarily result in significantly improved social progress. For example, on ‘Personal Safety’, it’s only when countries reach high-income status that homicide rates, violent crime and traffic deaths seem to significantly reduce, but even then there is a wide spread of variation between these high-income nations. Until then the improvements in ‘Personal Safety’, between low -and middle- income countries, remains stubbornly limited.