UNDP Press conference: Global Launch of UNDP report

Welcome to this briefer, the director of the Human Development Report Office.

Federal Concession is with us today to walk us through the key findings of a new report, which is titled Human Development Perspective on COVID-19.

But first, I had a couple of House coping rules to to remind you this is mostly for journalists.

When when you ask a question, we're going to give you the floor.

So you just need to raise your hand.

Please identify yourself with your surname, name and agencies on media outlet, please.

As I said, to go in queue for question, you just need to raise your hand and that activates a blue hand next to to your name and our colleague will give you the floor.

We, the colleague from Eunice Geneva, are managing the mute and mute of your microphone and the the briefer is recorded.

Our colleagues reminding me that if you want permission to record the conference locally, please send them a chat to UNTV Geneva.

I think we're good.

I'm going to give the floor to Pedro who can start briefing us and then we'll move on with the Q&A.

Pedro, the floor is yours.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sarah.

Good afternoon.

Good morning, colleagues.

Thank you for spending some time with us this morning, this afternoon to give us a chance to share with you the findings from the this human development perspective on COVID-19 and human development.

UNDP introduced the concept of human development in 1990, thirty years ago.

And one key idea was that development progress should not be measured by income alone, but also by how well countries were doing on health and education.

And it proposed a measure, the Human Development Index, that combines these 3 dimensions, health, income and education.

And since this message, since this measure was introduced 30 years ago, the Human Development Index never decreased year on year.

It increased almost every year, even when we faced major crises like the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.

Now what we observing is that we are seeing pressure on the three dimensions of the human development index.

So we know that income is likely to decrease this year to levels not seen globally, according to the IMF, since the Great Depression of the 1930s of the preceding century.

We know that child mortality is likely to increase not only as a direct consequence of the infection as such, but also indirect effects on health systems.

And UNDP is providing a new simulations of the impact that the response to the crisis is having on education, namely the fact that many children are out of school.

Nine of every 10 children are out of school, but if they don't have access to the Internet, they are not able to access education remotely.

So we provide that a measure that we call effective out of school rate.

Now if we bring all of these estimates into a simulated HDI, what we see is that the human development index, the simulated or adjusted human development index has a sharp drop.

Currently we are witnessing a sharp, a sharp drop and it's driven largely by the impact on these effective out of school rate, which would bring us to levels equivalent to what we saw in the 1980s in the mid mid 1980s.

So this is happening because it's really a global crisis.

So it's affecting affecting every country in the world.

It's happening almost at the same time in every country, also with a delay of a few weeks, one month or so.

But more fundamentally, it's unprecedented because it's hitting on the three dimensions of human development or those that are incorporated in human development index.

At the same time.

Previous crisis we had very sharp contractions in economic activity, for instance the global financial crisis, but health and education were not that affected.

This time we are seeing a heat to the three dimensions to income and health and education and this is making the crisis unprecedented and and systemic.

In the paper we also suggest some ideas on how to respond given this context.

And the first suggestion is that it is crucial to have an approach that takes takes into consideration inequalities.

So one of the simulations we make is to ask what would happen to this effective out of school rate if Internet access were to be improved.

And we find that the heat to the human development adjusted or simulated human development index would be cut by half.

So it's important to enable as many people as as possible to have access to to the Internet and to have an approach that doesn't exacerbate existing inequalities.

Secondly, that we should think of the response and the recovery in a way that builds resilience to future shocks.

This is not going to be the last shock, unfortunately, that we will be confronting.

And in the 2019 Human Development Report that we published last year, we called attention to the importance of looking at inequalities that are opening up in new aspects of life that are becoming more and more important.

And again, we gave emphasis to inequalities that are emerging when it comes to digital technology.

So last year, they seem important, but it's now becoming material, the fact that we are not paying attention to these inequalities that are opening up in new aspects of life.

And then finally, we think that's important, especially as we look towards the recovery, to understand how we can allocate resources and make decisions in ways that help us to address other challenges, and particularly those that relate to to climate change.

There is widespread public support for first recognising the importance of of climate change.

About 70% of people that were currently surveyed around the world said that climate change was as important as COVID-19.

And 2/3 of those surveyed also said that they would support measures during the recovery that would help us to address climate change.

So the report, to conclude, paints a picture of a moment in time in which we are observing, based on our simulated estimates of the adjusted Human Development Index, a major heat, unprecedented heat to human development.

But also that it's possible to frame a response to the current crisis and to think about the recovery in ways that would narrow inequalities and help us to address broader challenges that we confront related to sustainability and primarily climate change.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Pedro.

I, I see that Jamil as a question.

Jamil, the floor is yours.

Please introduce yourself.

Yes, thank.

You Pedro my name?

Is Jamil Shadi, I'm a journalist from Brazil based in Geneva.

My question is about, obviously I read your paper and it's obviously a very broad, let's say intake of the of the situation, but we have several different scenarios around the world who would be?

Most.

Affected in terms of regions and if you could talk a little bit more specifically about South America.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Shamil.

We haven't been able to do country by country analysis or a regional analysis, but we were able to do a breakdown of the impact of this effective out of school rate in countries aggregated by the level of human development measured by the human development Index.

So we have 4 categories of human development, very ****, ****, medium and low.

And what we observe is that those with lower levels of human development would be much more affected because this effective out of school rate would be much higher.

So we don't have a regional or country break breakdown, but by the analysis that we made based on levels of human development such as that, those that are not as well off would be hit hardest, which once again reinforces this idea that the crisis may in fact exacerbate existing inequalities.

Thank you very much, Pedro for your answer.

Lisa, let me give you the floor and please introduce yourself.

Yes, thanks, Sarah.

Good afternoon, Lisa Shlan, Voice of America.

So this your answer probably feeds into my question, which is I was wondering what the rankings are.

Every year you talk about the best the country and the worst off country in the world in terms of the your human development, achievements, progress and lack of it.

Are you saying you do not have a ranking, you are unable to take a survey because of COVID-19 that you weren't able to get around to ask to find out what the situation is?

And, and, and my recollection is that in the past, the best country was not necessarily the country that had the largest or the greatest GDP, greatest income, but other factors were involved in that.

Perhaps you could elaborate upon this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lisa.

Yes, you're right.

So the human development index is a Composite Index that includes the dimension linked on indicator linked to income.

So the size of the economy, we use growth national income per person, but also combines this indicator of income with achievements in health and achievements in education.

And we bring, when we bring all of these elements together.

Indeed, countries that have very **** levels of GDP per capita gross domestic product per person are not necessarily those that rank highest in our index because they're countervailing factors related to their achievements on health and on education.

So what we've been able to to do in this paper, as I mentioned earlier, was to estimate at an aggregate level or by grouping of countries depending on the level of human development, a simulation of the current ongoing impact on human development.

It doesn't mean that when we get around computing the human development index for this year, which will happen next year, we will have reflected exactly what we are currently simulating, in part because capacity doesn't disappear.

So what we're saying is, as currently children do not have access to learning if they are out of school and don't have Internet access.

But schools didn't disappear.

The administrative capacity to run an education system didn't disappear.

Teachers are still there.

So when the situation normalises and we move into the recovery, we expect the situation to improve.

But what the paper calls attention to and the simulations calls attention to is to the very deep crisis in human development that currently we are facing around the world.

Thank you.

Thank you, Pedro.

I think we have a question from Sarah.

Sarah, the floor is yours.

Please introduce yourself.

Thank you very much.

I'm Sarah Nui from the Telegraph in the UK.

You talked a bit about the impact, for instance, referring to the Great Depression and the 1980s.

But have we had a situation in which all three elements of the Human Development Index, obviously before it was modelled from 1990, a situation where we've seen this sort of triple ****** before?

And can you talk a little bit about what happened in each of these scenarios?

Thank you.

Thank you, Sarah.

We've confronted many shocks and prices in the past.

I would say that this shock is different in that first of all, is is really universal.

Sometimes we confront the natural hazards that effects very deeply a country or a region hurricane, a Tropic tropical cyclone somewhere around the world.

Or we confront a crisis that hits one dimension.

Financial crisis 2009 was primarily one that affected economic activity.

So this crisis is different because it's global in nature.

It's also almost synchronous.

It's happening almost at the same time.

It's it's, it's hitting every country at the same time.

And then finally, thirdly, it's hitting the three dimensions at the same time, in part because of the direct effect of of an health crisis on mortality, in putting additional pressure on the health system that creates additional problems on the health dimension.

But also because the the mitigation measures that are being implemented, which are absolutely needed and should be pursued, are affecting in an unprecedented way economic activity.

According to the IMF, we haven't seen a crisis, economic crisis such as this since the Great Depression.

And also because of the effect, the effective effect that it's having on the ability of children to learn, affecting the effective rate of education.

Once again, it's not that schools are disappearing.

So when situation normalises, we should be able to get all of these kids back in school.

But currently, at moment in time, instantaneously, our simulation suggests a very deep crisis in human development.

Thank you, Pedro.

Megan, I think you're unmuted.

So please introduce yourself and the floor is yours.

Hi.

Can you hear me OK?

Hello.

Yes.

Yeah, OK.

Thanks.

Yeah, My name is Megan Roving.

I work for Thomson Reuters Foundation.

I'm wondering if you have any comments on how long you expect this shock to development to last?

Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty around that, but I guess what I'm driving at, is this likely to be a temporary blip in the HDI or do you expect it to reverberate for several years?

And if so, what kind of clash damage are we looking at for the Sustainable Development Goals?

Thanks.

Thank you.

Megan.

As as you mentioned in your in your question as opposed to your question, there's a lot of uncertainty and we are not making projections.

But this gives me an opportunity to clarify what we are doing on the effective out of school rate.

So our assumption for the effective out of school rate in the simulations that you have in the paper is that this is going to pan out or affect children only for 1/4.

So we are assuming that in three out of the four quarters in 2020 school enrolment rates will be as they are in reality.

So we are only projecting or simulating.

Projecting is not the right word simulating a heat of 1/4 in computation of this effective out of school rate.

Thank you.

Thank you, Pedro.

Lisa, I don't know if you've got a new question or if you got, if you forgot your hand.

No, I, I didn't.

I, if you hear me, I didn't forget my hand to try to follow up.

But with this virtual life that we're leading and it's impossible to follow up.

So this is my follow up in a sense.

OK, all right, fine.

I tried to get some rankings and there are no rankings.

But you said that you do have some information about the regional situation.

I'm not sure if I got that right, but I'm.

But based on previous information, I mean generally the western developed countries tended to do better than a countries in Africa which were usually very low down.

And yet you did have outliers or differences like Sri Lanka, I believe one year came out on the tops.

So I was wondering if you have some information on the regional aspect, whether they pretty much follow past patterns, and also whether the impact of COVID, what kind of an impact on human development does the pandemic have on countries?

I'm thinking specifically of the United States, which may not have been in the tops of the rankings in the past, but pretty close to it and now has the worst pandemic, the worst epidemic in the world.

Would this?

Necessarily push it way down in the rankings, do you think or are there certain features in the economy there that would keep it in in more or less in the upper tier or stabilise it?

Thank you, Lisa.

On the regional or regional breakdown or country level information, we haven't been able to do the simulation at that level.

So we present aggregate and the aggregate that we present in the paper and we're able to provide data for are not regional based, but based on levels of human development.

So we do observe if you think of if you take the effective out of school rate that countries.

I think we've lost you, at least on my side I couldn't hear anything.

I don't know if it's the case for everyone.

Maybe I need some help from from the UNTV team just to to let us know whether we could hear petrol.

It was only on my side.

Can you hear me?

I can, I can hear you now, but OK, maybe you should repeat the end of your of your answer.

I'm sorry.

A sense of the difference of of impact when it comes to detective out of school rate.

When we compare very **** human development countries, the group of very **** human development countries with the group of low human development.

So effective out of school rate in the short term.

In very **** human development countries, we estimate to be 20% in very ****.

In low human development, we estimate it to be as **** as almost 90%.

Now, since the crisis effects 3 dimensions of of human development, health, education and the economic side, the way in which each of these dimensions is going to resolve itself in different countries will ultimately determine once the data is in at the end of the year into next year, how different countries fared and how that is going to play out in the Human Development Index when we're ready to to compute it.

So currently we are doing simulations that try to provide moment in time, instantaneous snapshot of what's happening when it comes to this crisis in human development.

How things are going to pan out in the different dimensions, Economic dimension, the education dimension and the health dimension will obviously vary from country to country.

But we can already see that countries with higher levels of human development are certainly much more protected when it comes to the ability to keep children learning, even if schools are closed through schooling and other remote learning techniques, because in fact, they have access to the Internet.

Kids have more than one computer at home.

So presumably parents can be also working if their activities can be done remotely.

And of course, these conditions are not met in many other countries around the world.

And what the paper highlights these inequalities that are being exacerbated currently.

And once again, we'll have to see how the situation evolves on the three dimensions, the economy, health and education.

And ultimately that will determine what the the Human Development Index will be for each country.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Pedro, I think Megan has a follow up question.

If I'm correct, Megan, the floor is yours.

Yeah, thanks.

It was just to get a sense of how you plan to track the change, you know, for the through the rest of the year.

Because for example, if you're only looking at 1/4 in terms of children not being at school, then that seems that it could be an underestimate in terms of the likely impact on development because in a lot of places it may well last for longer than 1/4.

Do you have a plan for how to sort of communicate the ongoing impact?

And just wondering your thoughts about whether this might push inequality in its various forms up the political agenda when it comes to development priorities.

Thank you, Megan.

You're right.

I think we've been deliberately conservative in the assumptions we've made for our simulation.

Certainly when it comes to this effective out of school rate, there's a lot of uncertainty.

So we thought it would be more prudent to err on the side of caution and assume that this will affect the schools only for on average only for 1/4 in.

The media reports are suggesting that the schools are starting to open up in many countries, but we don't know for instance, if they're going to be further spikes in infections in different countries that may lead to to different reactions.

So there's a lot of of of uncertainty and our intention is not so much to provide the a real time assessment of the evolution of the situation, but really to call attention to the public decision makers around the world of the deep crisis, currently the deep human development crisis that this pandemic is imposing on many people around the world.

And to answer your second question on on inequality, to highlight the real, the real impact and the real effect of these inequalities that are opening up in new aspects of life that we highlighted in the 2019 Human Development Report that are now materialising.

The impact of disparities in access to the Internet, in the ability to benefit from the opportunities of the digital economy is not just an academic or theoretical hypothesis.

Now we're seeing the implications materialising in the differences that different people, different families, different countries around the world have to cope with the with this crisis.

Thank you, Pedro.

Unfortunately, I have to drop, but my colleague LeBlanc will as kindly accept it to continue the moderation.

We've got at least three more question and I'm sure we can continue at least for five more minutes.

Talk to all of you very soon, Ryan.

I'm going.

To let you take over please.

Very good.

Thank you very much, Sarah, and good afternoon, everyone.

I see that we have a question from Chelsea.

So Chelsea, if we're going to mute your microphone and you could introduce yourself, please?

Hi.

Yeah, I'm Chelsea.

From the financial.

Times in the UK.

I just wondered if we could get a bit.

More on the assumptions made in the model.

You said something interesting about the education element only being.

Accounted for, for one.

Quarter.

Of two.

1020 for life expectancy in G and I.

Are there any other assumptions that?

Would be good to share.

Thank you, Chelsea.

So for income, we use the projections of the IMF that were presenting presented during the spring meetings in April.

The managing director of the IMF has indicated that they are working to revise their estimates and they are likely to have been in their estimation of the economic impacts.

So from that perspective, we've been cautious when we looked at the projections on the economic side, one, life expectancy, which is indicated that we used to measure the health achievement in the human Development Index.

We haven't done detailed simulations, but based on the information that is emerging on the impact on child mortality, especially in developing countries, we estimated that the level of life expectancy currently in the simulated HDI is the same as it was in 2019.

Typically, life expectancy from year to year on average has increased by 0.3 years.

So without the crisis, we'd have expected an increase, an improvement in life expectancy.

So the assumption here is that we will not see that much of an improvement in the simulations.

Once again, I'm not saying this is a projection of what's likely to happen.

These are the assumptions that we use in our simulations.

And for effective out of school, we assume that out of four quarters children, 9 out of 10 children would be out of school.

And and then if they didn't have access to the Internet, they would be effectively out of school, meaning without an ability to learn.

So those were the assumptions.

But maybe I can ask if that's OK Real, my colleague Roberto to complement what I said or correct what I said if I said something that was not correct.

Certainly, yes.

We are also joined by Roberto Tapia, who is a policy specialist at the Human Development Report Office.

There he is.

Hello, Roberto.

Would you like to add something to what Pedro has said?

Colleagues, could you unmute?

OK, You have the floor.

Thank you.

Yeah, just to, to, to go over the, the life, the the health issue.

There is a lot of uncertainty, but there are some emerging estimates about what is expected to happen in in, in child mortality, maternal mortality over the next six months.

So the the estimate place the number in in of additional children under five years of age dying between 250,000 to more than 1,000,000.

So it's a big number and we have used the most conservative figure in that range to make the to write to the conclusion that Pedro was mentioning.

So of course, we, we don't know for sure what's what's going to happen, but we feel confident that we are using, we're being cautious.

So the, the, the, the, the magnitude of the, of the four that we are simulating is, is something that is, is, is is, is, is reasonable and therefore it should trigger action because all of these number depends on how government react.

So we don't have to go through such a tragedy of increasing in in in infant mortality and mortality.

And also when it comes to education, even though we need to take the precautions of protecting the health in our societies, there are ways in which governments can increase the connectivity and the resources of people to being able to function in education and in other aspects of life over.

Thank you very much for these clarifications.

We will go back now to Sarah Nui.

Sarah.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I just wondered if you could talk about a bit more about how you quantified the overall drop.

So you talk a lot about the shock that we're seeing and that it's worse than the only time it's declined.

But how much has it dropped by?

How have you quantified that overall figure?

Thank you.

Thank you, Pedro.

Thank you, Sir.

So human development index, the indicators that go into the human development index.

On the economic side, we have GNI growth, national income per person.

So compared to 2009, we are using the estimates on the impact on growth rates that come from the IMF to show a decline that globally current or in April was projected to be around 4%.

So that quantifies the heat on income.

Once again, this likely to be an underestimation based on recent statements by the Managing Director of the IMF.

On a health, the indicator that goes into the health component is life expectancy at birth.

No life expectancy at birth is influenced primarily by what happens or changes in life expectancy at birth primarily by improvements in child mortality.

So as Roberto was alluding to, some indications currently are that depending or conditional on the response of countries obviously that there could be an increase in child mortality rate.

So that led us to the assumption that life expectancy at birth, unlike the norm in previous years from 2000 and and 19 will not that we do not improve because it's not a projection or prediction that we're making.

But the assumption that went into the simulation for the adjusted human development index was that it would, it was the, it is the same as last year life expectancy at at birth.

And then for, for schooling, we actually use 2 indicators.

1 is expected years of schooling which we don't touch and the stock of average years of schooling of the population.

Now the average years of schooling of the population is based on school enrolment rate at different ages.

So the assumption that went into the simulation was based on the the premise that children that do not have access to the Internet will not be able to benefit from learning and so they would effectively be out of school.

So that generates an effective out of school rate that corresponds to an adjustment of the real out of school rate by the level of access to the Internet or or lack lack thereof.

So when you combine all of these elements, it gives you an adjusted simulated human development index that would have a significant drop compared to the levels of of of 2019.

It would actually take us back to the value of the HDI six years ago.

Thank you.

OK, I thought we had a follow up question from Sarah, but the hand has been lowered.

Yes, there, she's back.

Sarah, you have a follow up.

Thank you.

I just wondered how big is that overall drop in the HDI index?

You say it's dropped to the value six years ago, but how how substantial is that drop in percentage terms?

Thank you.

Let me ask Eddie Bert if we did a simulation in terms of of percentage terms.

We do have a graph in the report that does show the absolute change in the HDI.

So the real change in the HDI up to 2019 and then compares that with the drop.

The order of magnitude of the drop in the simulated HDI is 3 times as ****, approximately 3 times as **** as the improvement that we have seen on average over the last few years.

I don't know if this helps Sarah, but if you want a percentage, if we don't have it, we can certainly give it to you.

But let me ask Eddie Bear to just to to come in and see if he can give you a number already.

Reberto, there you go.

Thank you.

Yeah, we, we certainly can compute that.

It's, it's 2.5%.

However, this number alone can be misleading because of the nature of the human development Index.

It's a very slow moving indicator.

And therefore this this percentage change is very large In comparison to what is the usual variation of the human development index.

So the one of the charts that we have shared with you precisely show this comparison and and.

And there you can see two things.

First, as Pedro mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, for the first time, according to the assumptions we have used, the human Development Index adjusted can fall.

So in the in, in, in, in, in.

Since the creation of the concept, in spite of the crisis that we have had in the past, this has never fallen, and now we can see a drop.

And 2nd, the magnitude of the change is very big, very significant as Pedro was mentioning was.

And you can see in the, in the few was several times bigger than the typical change in a, in a, in a, in, in the indicator and it's a negative change over.

Thank you very much.

My colleagues are telling me that we have a question from Radmila, from Aljazeera Radmila, if we can unmute your microphone, we'll give you the floor.

Hi, good.

Well, good morning here in New York.

Good afternoon, Eva.

I just have a question.

Would you say that?

The global.

The Global.

Response has been, with all these facts and everything that you're presenting, which paints a pretty dismal picture, was the global response the best the world could have done at the moment?

And going forward, what really could be done to ensure that something like this, if it, when it happens again, does not hit development?

The way it is.

At the moment.

Thank you, Radmila Pedro, Thank you, Rod Miller.

The crisis was simply imposed in a context in which we were observing these deeply entrenched inequalities that we called attention to in the 2019 Human Development Report.

So in that report we put an emphasis on inequalities that are opening up in new aspects of life.

When we think of development, we tend to think about the basics, the basic achievements which are important, in which we have been making progress.

We've been able to reduce extreme poverty, child mortality has been decreasing rapidly, and all are these achievements that need to be celebrated.

But in that report we called attention to, for instance, access to the Internet, to broadband, to these new aspects of life in which having access to to these, we call them in the report, enhanced capabilities would be more and more important for people to participate in social life, in economic life.

And what the crisis has shown is the materialise materialisation of the impact of these inequalities that are very clear when it comes to the ability of people to remain economically actively active or children in school if they don't have access to the Internet, for instance.

So there was the crisis was simply imposed in a context in which we were already confronting these deeply entrenched inequalities.

So what we are trying to to do with the report is to highlight and quantify to some extent the impact of the convergence of a crisis with these entrenched inequalities and call attention once again to pursue policies during the response to the crisis and during the recovery that addressed these entrenched inequalities.

So we think it's important to have this equity lens as we think of the response as it unfolds currently and as we look at the recovery.

Very good, thank you.

Are there any last questions for our guests this morning?

Just give a few seconds to see if we have any more raised hands and I don't see any.

So I think we will close this press briefing now.

I'd like to thank Pedro Consechao from the Human Development Report Office as well as Heriberto Tapia from the same office for being with us this afternoon to brief on this new UNDP report.

Human Development Perspectives, COVID-19, assessing the impact envisaging, envisaging the recovery.

The recording of this briefing will be on UN Web TV shortly later this afternoon.

And thank you everyone for joining us.

Have a nice afternoon.