

Wellbeing is very much on the rise, according to UNDP’s new flagship Human Development Report. Human development, UNDP’s defining mandate, aims broadly to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, happy lives, with responsive governments and the chance to achieve their potential.

The new Report shows developing nations driving economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty and propelling many into a new global middle class. This massive shift is reshaping the 21st century, and extends from Brazil, China and India to smaller countries such as Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda and Tunisia.

More than 40 developing countries have made greater than expected human development gains, through their sustained investment in education, health care, and social programs, and open engagement with a world made smaller by information and communication technologies and globalization.

This is a development success story. Countries that recently utilized development assistance themselves now have the capacity and the means to engage in development cooperation.



Another striking poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found people in emerging economies vastly more likely to believe their economic conditions are good and improving—and to be optimistic about their children’s futures.

So why are pollsters and researchers studying wellbeing more intensively than ever before? The reason is that measuring economic output alone reveals and predicts little, as the HDR’s founding authors wrote when they launched the series in 1990.




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