Hi everyone. Welcome to this evening's event where we'll hear from some of the contributors to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. Sorry about that, yes. Discussing the World Development Challenges Report, which has just come out. It's just available on their website, but you have the benefit of being able to hear from some of the contributors and people who've been involved in its production this evening. I'll turn over to Carlos who will introduce the various speakers in a few minutes, but I just wanted to say I'm Laura Hammond. I'm a Pro Director for Research and Knowledge Exchange here at SOAS and wanted to say this is one of the first, this the first official event of the Center for Development Policy and Research, which is based in the Department of Development Studies. CDPR has been in existence for a very long time. We were just trying to remember actually what year it was formed, but it was founded by one of our previous professors, John Weeks, who some old-timers may remember, and then for a long time stewarded by Terry McKinley and now is going through a kind of recalibration and a relaunch with Jonathan Goodhand as its director and Haven Hill as its coordinator. So it's great to see CDPR really taking the lead in terms of some of our thinking around SOAS about current development challenges, thinking critically around what we as a community at SOAS may bring to some of those discussions and also kind of providing a portal for the community to have access to this wider kind of debates that are going on within development globally. So welcome tonight and I'll pass over to Carlos Oya who will do the real introductions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. It's a pleasure to welcome you all to the launch of the World Development Challenges Report, which has been launched by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. And I'm pleased to have distinguished speakers representing the Commission and other organizations within the UN with a long history of working on many of these questions. And the report is particularly focused on questions of measurement. We present an index and I guess for our students this is particularly relevant since this is an important topic in many of our courses, how we measure, development and what kinds of indicators and indices are best at ranking countries and showing us progress or lack of progress. So for that purpose we've organized this launch which is going to include first Khalid Abu as Ismail. Selim, yeah sorry. Selim Jahan will speak first. Selim is former director of the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Program, UNDP New York, and the lead author of the Global Human Development Report, which many of you know. Prior to serving this position from 2014 to 2018 he also sell senior positions in the organization including director of the Poverty Division of UNDP. And before that he held various positions in university, in government as an economic advisor at the Planning Commission for the Government of Bangladesh, and he has contributed to work and consultancy etc. In other organizations such as ILO, UNDP and the World Bank. Selim has a PhD in economics from McGill University in Canada. Then we will have Khalid Abu Ismail from the Regional Commission from the Economic Social Commission for Western Asia. He leads the Commission's projects on poverty, inequality and human development. From 2002 to 2012 he was the UNDP Regional Poverty and Macroeconomic Advisor in Arab states and I think it was at that time there was a lot of collaboration with CDPR, not to be with Terry McKinley. Before joining UNDP in 1992, sorry, that's Selim, and he was, he has authored more than 50 technical papers and flagship publications including this particular report. And he holds the PhD in development economics from the New School for Social Research in New York. Then we're going to have also the contribution from Natasha Lindstein from the University of Essex who has collaborated in the production of the report. She's a political science professor at the University of Essex where she also serves as a faculty dean of education for social sciences. And she has published on books on authoritarian regimes, good governance, development and democracy. And her most important contribution was to the governance dimensions of the development challenges report. So we will have around 40 minutes for the presentation of the report and particularly the index. And then after that we will have two discussions joining from remotely via Zoom. We will start with our colleague, Amir Labdiwi, from the Department of Development Studies here at SOAS. Amir is also a development economist and is currently a lecturer in the political economy of development in our department at SOAS. And previously he was a Canon House Research Fellow at the LSE at the Latin American Caribbean Center. He has been working on economic development and diversification of resource dependent nations, low carbon innovation and industrialization in the context of climate change and he regularly advises governments, international organizations. And last but not least we have Sabine Al-Qaeda from the University of Oxford, Professor of Poverty and Human Development directing the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative which is famous for its multi-dimensional poverty index and very well placed to comment on composite indices of welfare. And previously she worked at George Washington University, Hardware University and the World Bank and also holds a PhD in economics from Oxford. So we're ready to start, Sabine. Thank you, Carlos. I know that this report has a lot of outliers in different chapters that does not mean that the part of the audience has to be in the periphery. So we are not dangerous, so if you feel like come closer so that we have more intimate discussion on the report there. My job is simple. I'll hand it over to Khalid in a few minutes' time. I just want to make five opening remarks. First is it yet another report? And the resounding answer to that is no. This is a report which has actually focused on many of the challenges that the world is facing right now. This is also a report which is looking at those challenges and the development outcomes through a different and broader lens. And this is also a report which is looking at various aspects of human development and tries to expand our knowledge of frontiers on that particular topic. So this is a report but not yet another report. The second point is so if this particular report is very much anchored into human development, what are its points of departure? Where it departs from the traditional or basic human development paradigm? I think the points of departure are three-fold. One, like the human development report it looks at the indicators of human development from a quantitative perspective, yes, but it also looks at the human development dimensions from qualitative perspectives. So therefore the school enrollment is important for this report but so is the classroom size. So is whether the teachers are trained or not. So I think to bring the qualitative aspect of human development is something new and novel to this report. The second point of departure in this particular report is that it looks at challenges. Sometimes we look at development outcomes from two perspectives. One is achievements, one is challenges. When you have some kind of an index or measurement in terms of achievements, you are basically looking backward. But when you talk about the challenges and tries to measure those challenges, you are looking forward. So therefore that's the second point of departure for this particular report. And the third point of departure is that it not only looks at human capabilities in terms of life expectancy, in terms of education and knowledge, in terms of standard of living, but also has brought the dimensions of environmental sustainability as well as governance. So those two aspects are also part of the index that has been presented in this particular report. So from those three perspectives represent the point of departure for this particular report from the national basic traditional human development. The third thing is that even though this particular report has been prepared by the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, this is not a regional report. As you can see from the title of the report, it is a global report. It is the contribution of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia to the global debate and global dialogue on different aspects of development. So it would not do justice to think that this is a regional report focusing on Arab states only. This is a global report of which the Arab states is a part. The fourth point is when I read the report and I advised the report too, so my responsibilities are also there. There are five key messages that I actually picked up from this report. The first, the report stresses that the world we live in is unequal, unstable and unsustainable. The second message is that in this world, a significant portion of population are still in difficult situations and in some cases the situations and positions are deteriorating. The third, that we have made a lot of progress. We have impressive achievements around the world and we should celebrate that. But at the same time, we must not be complacent because there are more works to be done and we should take up those challenges and go for them. The fourth one is the environmental sustainability and climate change are not only environmental issues, they are development concerns. So they should be looked from a broader perspective. And the fifth and the final message is unless and until we fix governance, we cannot fix development. My final and the fifth opening remark is there is no presumption on our part that this is a perfect report. We do not have the arrogance of saying that our report has the last word or is the only word. It is not a perfection, perfect report, but we did not want to make perfection the enemy of the good. So therefore, the kind of the information we have, the kind of the analysis that we have done, we are very much conscious of their shortcomings. But this is the beginning and this is an intellectual journey and intellectual enterprise where we think that people like you, our collaborators, our development partners will join for further research to bring it to the frontier of our knowledge. We also expect that the kind of the framework that have been presented in the report would be tested under different circumstances in different regions for the validity and the vindication of the framework that has been proposed. And it would be taken up by the researchers, the academics to actually extend our knowledge and our frontier of understanding. So with those words, I think now Khalid will take over and this wise man would provide with us a broader account of what is in the report. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good evening. Thank you, Celine, for these very remarkable and very pertinent introductory remarks. I'm really pleased to be here so as and in many ways it's also very pertinent to be here because this report challenges conventional wisdom on development thinking and there's no better place I think to launch the report than from an institution that is very well reputed and very well known to do the same thing. So in a way, I think as Celine said, we are not claiming that this report, this index, this work is the ultimate say has the ultimate answers to very complex questions on how to measure development. But it does provide a contribution and is also, I mean, Celine spoke a lot about the motivation, but I would also add like three particular points that motivated us to do this work. The first is that the development challenges we face in the development landscape is very different than the one we faced early in the 1990s when there was a lot of effort and of course, Celine took a big part of it in operationalizing the concept of human development and capabilities and the world we live in faces very different challenges. So it does pose a question of how can we adjust our measurement framework. The other motivation is a regional one. If you were to take the development indices out there and of course, they're all serve a very good purpose. But if you were to tell a development story of the Arab region in particular, you will see that our story is highly sensitive to the choice of these indices. So, for example, the Human Development Index story would give a very brighter picture about the Arab region than one in which other major issues such as governance and sustainability has taken into account. So our main purpose, one of our main purposes is to develop this framework because we need to then go back and produce an Arab development challenges report but armed with this new perspective so that we can factor in these contextual issues, very important contextual issues like good governance and sustainability. And finally, we also want to and it's part of our mandate to contribute to global thinking. That's what regional commissions do and in fact we're part of the global dialogue that is taking place right now on how to measure progress beyond GDP. So this in a way is also a contribution to that. This has been a report that took almost more than two years in the making and it's in addition to the core team members of which I'm part of with two members of the Karim Jaffer and Maria Hetty and very young I should say members. We also had two global advisors, Celine and your very own Terry McKinley, nine contributing authors, 13 senior reviewers, 10 background papers, technical background papers, all of which are online and maybe scores of expert group meetings. So it really has been a lengthy consultative process and if you see the way that we started thinking about this and how we ended, there has been a lot of thinking and rethinking that has went into this. So again, these are complex issues, very difficult issues and measuring them is also very challenging. So keep that in mind. As Celine mentioned, there are three fundamental challenges that we think are facing the world today, not just the Arab region, but all regions developing be they are developed. One is to go beyond the basic human development achievements and factor in quality issues, so quality of health, quality of education and quality of income, which is of course conceptually problematic, more conceptually problematic and difficult to measure. And then there's the environmental sustainability challenge and of course there's the good governance challenge. We wanted to follow the same spirit of the human development index and keep it simple. So what we're doing is we're keeping a simple arithmetic averaging aggregation method in order to be able to show the contributions of all of the dimensions and sub dimensions. And this is basically the DCI, the Development Challenges Index that we are basing our narrative on. Essentially, we have three challenges that are broken down into seven dimensions. So with the Quality Adjusted Human Development Challenge, it's the elements of the Human Development Index, but adjusted for quality. We have not adjusted for quality, so we have healthy life as an indicator and we have also quality adjusted education and we adjust for education using the international test scores and we have the quality of income. Now of course, the best way for you to measure the quality of income would be to ask well, you know, what is it that really matters from income? So the best answer that we can give is if it leads to poverty reduction or poverty eradication. But we didn't have a good way to discount income using that measure. So the second best option was to use the inequality measure, the Atkinson measure, used by UNDP in order to discount income. But in the revised version of the report, because we've managed to answer this challenging question, we'll use actually the ESQUA Poverty Index. But that's another separate technical discussion I don't think we'll have time to go into today. Environmental sustainability has two parts. One which is the quality of the environment we're living in, environmental health. And that's taken from the Yale Index and it measures basically issues like air quality and access to water and sanitation. All of which by the way are correlated with income. But these are the factors that affect healthy life. So they were chosen deliberately because of the link they have with healthy life. So your healthy life index is in a way correlated with these particular factors and one can argue of course caused by them. And then you have the climate change and energy, which is something that is fundamentally important. And that's no perspective on sustainability can have a measure without including that. And in that aspect we're looking at material footprints and we're looking at energy efficiency. So that's basically the two fundamental sub dimensions we're looking at here. Governance has been the most difficult one to argue for. And after lengthy debates and back and forth and Natasha can speak a lot more about that. We've decided to have two aspects, two fundamental aspects. One which we are all in agreement on is what we call democratic governance. Things like your access to justice and rule of law and of course accountability and participation. These are the fundamental aspects I think we're all agree on. Why not other indicators and not why not other sub dimensions like corruption or human rights indicators? Because we believe that if you have those three right everything else will follow. That's again a pre analytical position, which is very important.  And that's ours. But there's also another part of the story which is how effective are your governments? Are they delivering on good quality public services or not? And that's a very important part of the story as well. So both of these are also taken into account in our definition of governance. As any index would be, you have to explain the categories in scoring. We have five categories. So we have an extra category on top of your typical human development index. Now if we have scores that are below 2.2 are considered to be very low in terms of the DCI level of challenge. Scores that are between 0.2 and 0.3 or 0.299 to be more precise are considered to be low, 0.3 to 0.45, 0.49 are considered to be medium. 0.45 to 0.549 is a high challenge and anything above 0.55 is considered to be a very high challenge category. This is the flip side of the human development index. So we're measuring challenges here. So the higher you are, the closer you are to one, the more challenged you are. The closer you are to zero, the implication is you don't have challenges. So now I get into the results. Essentially I think we have four main messages and I think Salim has alluded to some of the most important ones. Now as expected, the most challenged region in the world is Sub-Saharan Africa with a score of 0.553. Sub-Saharan Africa actually exceeds the very high category, so Sub-Saharan Africa is in that sense very highly challenged region on the DCI. And the least challenge is North America at 0.249, which puts it at a low DCI level. The interesting thing is that none of the regions are at a very low level. So none of them are below the 0.2, which basically means that when you factor in all of these dimensions and additional sub-dimensions, you still have a lot to go. You still have a lot of work to do in order for you to reach the very low category of human development. The world itself on average is at a 0.437, so it's at upper medium level, closer to the highly level challenge. And if you were to tell the story of overtime change and start in the year 2000, you will see that there's only been a slight decline in the global DCI. That speaks of the sluggish nature of the index. And now not all regions obviously have moved at the same pace. In fact, not all countries have witnessed an improvement in the DCI. There are 11 countries that saw a regression in their DCI values. Many of them are actually from the Arab region and two are from Latin America. In terms of the contributions, governance has overtaken sustainability as the largest contributor to the DCI in the year 2020. But there's a very important issue here, which is if you look at the relative contributions of the dimensions, you'll see that there is a relatively equal distribution, which again speaks to the fundamental importance of all of these dimensions. Now moving, I guess, a bit more quickly, one of the other important issues that we wanted to highlight was that nearly 50% of the world's population is living in either highly challenged or very highly challenged countries. And that's a very different narrative than the one you get from using other indices out there. And less than 5% are living in very low challenged countries. So there's a significant level of challenges, Celine mentioned. We are living in a very difficult environment and developmentally. And the progress that was done over time was almost entirely, I would say, but not entirely, but mainly due to China. So China's move from the very highly challenged to highly medium challenged category has really significantly affected the population distribution. Now, again, going into the indices contributing to the DCI, education is still the most important contributor to the quality adjusted human development index. And we can see that there has been progress across the board, but it's still, you know, even North America and Europe. And of course, I know that one of the questions in the comments would be why did we mix Europe with Central Asia, and we can talk about that afterwards. But Europe and Central Asia and North America are still not there in terms of the very low level of development. So even with those regions, there's still a lot of room for improvement. I think that is really a very important message. When you adjust human development achievements for quality, you can begin to see that there's still a lot more work to be done, especially in the educational component of it. The health part is the least contributor to this quality adjusted human development index. And then the income in a quality adjusted component is the second highest. Environmental sustainability is mainly challenged in its access to environmental health and environmental health indicators are the ones that are having a more important contribution. And that also resonates with the message that you still have a lot to do on reducing pollution and access to basic water and sanitation in most of the developing region, except of course for the richer North America and Europe where you can see that climate change indicators are the ones that are contributing more to the environmental sustainability index. And that's expected because this is where you have the energy efficiency and carbon footprint indicators and the European countries obviously lag behind on those. Governance is the most pressing challenge, as we've mentioned before, and particularly in the Arab region where it's lagging significantly behind, so very highly challenged region. And globally this is the only challenge where we've actually seen a deterioration. So all of the others have improved with the exception of governance. In fact, we can see a population jump from the, if you put together the countries that are highly and very highly challenged and look over time, you've seen a jump from about 3.6 billion to around 4.7 billion in 2020, over the period from 2000 to 2020. Commensurately we've also seen a decline in the population living in countries that have very low challenge on this particular dimension from 780 million, and they were initially 294 million. So that's fundamentally alarming that we're living in a world where governance indicators are deteriorating and when you look at the conflicts that are happening and we know that governance is a major contributor to conflict, that's something to also be taken into account. What to do, so these are, as I said, the main findings and now the question is what to do. Obviously we need to strengthen the report as four key messages. Obviously you need to strengthen the link between environment and health and COVID is of course a very good example of the need to do so. But the question is how do you do that with the current pressures you have on fiscal limitations, you have in many countries on health systems. So that's why the second recommendation is that you need to build more resilient economies and economies that are able to adapt to technological change and the industrial revolutions that are taking place. So that's another major recommendation and of course the labor markets are fundamental because that's how you are able to build resilience at the household level as well. So that's our second more and very important policy message. And then of course the government effectiveness and democratic governance nexus is also equally fundamental. We take the position that there need not to be an authoritarian bargain. Countries don't need to either have good democratic governance or good public service delivery and government effectiveness. You can have both and in many parts of the world has been put as a trade off between those two fundamental elements when we don't think that to be true. And there are many countries in the world that demonstrate that this is possible. Nordic countries for example are leading in terms of their governance indicators. And the last but definitely not least our main message here is that when you flip the order and the spectrum, the analytical spectrum to focus primarily on the most developed, most challenged countries in the world and then it becomes clear that there is a lot to be done and the fundamental recommendation therefore we to prioritize those countries. And particularly the countries that are going through conflict like Yemen and globally H.A. is also one of the highest score on the DCI. So these are policy recommendations and now I just very briefly, I don't know how much time I have, but just very briefly two minutes. I want to show you some correlations that matter when you do the number crunching and you plot quality adjusted human development against the variables that are presumed to influence it. We see that there's a very strong correlation between its performance and between things like health system capacities that is fundamentally made out of doctors to population ratios, nurse to population ratios and access to public service. So these are, and the same thing happens when you do the quality adjusted education, you look at the pupil teacher ratio. So these are fundamentally important for the performance of that indicator. With the environmental sustainability indicators we see a conundrum here that I think we're all aware of that. There's climate change indicators positively correlated with income and environmental health indicators are negatively correlated with income. So basically you have, a lot of the pollution is being generated by developed countries and many of the poorer countries are living in poor environments and paying the price for that in poorer health. And that's the political economy I think that we are seeing in a lot of the discussions including in the COP forthcoming in Sharma Sheikh will have to speak to the heart of these issues. Human development and governance is a very important nexus. Our insight is that it's very convoluted. It's a very intricate relation. But once you get to a certain threshold of good governance or human development, then the relationship becomes a lot more straightforward. So once you get to a point three or a medium, once you exceed that medium level of governance, then you see the relationship is a lot more linear, a lot more understandable. But before that there's a lot of noise, a lot of fuzzy. In other words there are many pathways to the relationship between a variety of relations you can think of between governance and human development. And we have to bear that in mind that this is part of the main stylized facts we know about that relation. Why that is, of course, is a subject for a more lengthy debate. Another one of our main debates that we had is whether or not to include human rights in the, because it's closer to the framework of human development. And as I said, when you look at the relationship between the governance indicators and the outcomes on human rights, you see a very close correlation. So we prefer to stick to the fundamental drivers and that's the rule of law access to justice and participation and voice and accountability. One minute. I want to speak to our current agenda because this is how we want to translate all of this in terms of policy action. So when we take all of this work and we go down at the country level, we want to focus on the inequality drivers in these challenges. So it's not just about the averages, it's going beyond the averages. And the second message, of course, is how do you build resilience economies? Those are two fundamental preoccupations and we're doing a lot of technical work. So we're zooming in on the inequalities by proposing a development inequalities index focused around the same dimensions of the DCI. And the initial results are also showing very interesting correlations in between this inequalities in development, which is capturing all kinds of inequalities, vertical inequalities, horizontal inequalities, inequalities in opportunities, inequalities in outcomes. And we're very excited to be going down that path. But again, due to time limitations, we won't be able to get into the technical details. Building resilience economies, we're also trying to look at the relationship between what is a resilient economy, a real economy, financial sector resilience and the DCI. And we do see some interesting results, but maybe when you get results like the point to the fact that you have Kuwait and Japan at the same level of resilience or Saudi Arabia, you have to start re-examining whether this makes sense or not, even though we know that lately with oil surpluses that there has been more fiscal space for many of the oil-wealthy countries. Finally, our future agenda is to contribute, as Salim said, to the global thinking. We have an Arab Development Challenges Report coming up, but we also want to take this at the national level. And so we are inviting countries to also take this work and to tailor Development Challenges Indices at the national level. And they can decide on which variables matter more, which dimensions, sub-dimensions matter more. So that's an important part and we're very excited to push that work at that level. My last slide is that you can visit our DCI website and you can look at the background papers or 10 papers. And we also have an Esquia Index Simulator that basically allows you to see the impact of any country's performance on the overall rank and score change, which I think will be very interesting for many of the students. Thank you and I apologize if I've taken a little bit more time. May I call Natasha? Hi, thanks, Ken, for having me. Can everybody hear me okay? Yes. Okay. For me, there's a little bit of an echo. So apologies to those that are listening over Zoom. So it was a great pleasure that I got the chance to work on this Development Report. And so nice to work with Khaled and also Salim on this. I would agree with Khaled that the most challenging aspect was measuring governance and we had lengthy and healthy debates on how we're going to do this. And there was a lot of back and forth about should we go this way or this direction and we did end up deciding that there wasn't a perfect set of indicators that we could land on, but we chose the best ones that we could get in the framework that we were working with. And we felt that it wasn't really important to take into account democratic governance, even though this was really difficult to measure. So this governance index is not just measuring outputs or results or outcomes, but is also measuring processes. And that made it difficult in some ways because we had to deal with some perceptions data. But as Salim and Khaled said, the emphasis on governance is really important to the report because it's so intimately connected with all kinds of other problems, whether it be conflicts or whether it leads to more coups or greater levels of poverty. And so we took it very seriously at how important the role of governance is. Now what you will notice with the index and the way that we were measuring governance is that what we're bringing in, I asked to unmute, I don't know if that helps a little bit. Don't have an indicator of elections. There are many, many countries in the world that have elections if they're not democracies. We focused on other indicators that we thought were really important to democratic governance. And so this includes aspects related to the rule of law and access to justice and institutional accountability. And as part of institutional accountability, I was really interested in looking at personalism, in particular, we were really interested in looking at personalism. And so one of the indicators is executive oversight. And we also look at judicial accountability, and then also rigorous and partial and public administration. But an additional thing that is important to good governance is of course participation and particularly bottom up style participation. And so that's where we brought in indicators of CSO, civil society, organization consultation and just the overall participatory environment. And so these were important processes that we thought were important to capturing good governance. And then we added to that this government effectiveness index that looked at the outputs, the quality of some of these services, whether it be infrastructure or just public service delivery. And you can see in some of the examples that we have in the chapter and just throughout the report how important good governance is. We see that one of the biggest movers was Georgia from 2000 to 2020. And in the late 1990s it was essentially a failed state. And so there were some huge improvements that were made in order to improve the quality of its institutions to reduce corruption levels, reduce personalism, which were instrumental to to resolving some of the conflicts with the breakaway regions there. And just to improve its overall levels of development. But many countries around the world including Georgia face many challenges from growing levels of personalism. And I emphasize this again, because in this big wave of autocratization that we're facing, this seems to be connected very closely with with poor governance. And that has a huge impact on a host of other outcomes that are really, really critical to development. So, I think I can stop there I don't want to go over time. I just acknowledge that while the governance section. It had its issues there was no perfect way to measure it we were really keen on bringing this into the development index and into into measuring development. And we see it as incredibly important. And it's a little disheartening that things aren't going so well for much of the world as our report indicates. But it shows how important this is to be at the top of the agenda. Thank you. Thank you Natasha. Good. I think we're right on time 40 minutes as as planned, which is great. Now we're going to move to our two discussions, and we will start with Amir. Yes, please Amir. Go ahead. Hi everyone, can you hear me? Super. No, thank you very much for for such an insightful presentation. You know, they say statistics are the lens through which we see and understand the world. So this work is isn't particularly valuable. We just unpack more clearly the how to measure development and capture its multidimensionality. And that's a very important step, you know, to inform policy actions right more targeted and and more effective. So I wanted to start by praising the clearly valuable effort that has been done. I'm sure Sabina will talk a lot more in the multidimensional approach of poverty so so so I want to cover that but I wanted to particularly talk about the effort in capturing the quality of development outcomes, both of the environmental aspects, but these are two parameters that you know in recent years that has been in that indices trying to capture it, especially the inequality just at HDI, but also the sustainable development index, but he calls, but this development challenge index takes one step forward, right in terms of bringing those different worlds together and giving a better picture. And that's the environmental part in particular. I wanted to raise the issue of of how resilience is measured. So I've noticed that, you know, one thing in particular which differs from similar indices is the is the fact that it's green as CO2 per capita is measured in terms of production, right, not just in consumption. And it leads to asking the question in terms of whether have you basically thought or distinguishing in terms of the environmental challenge both the, the challenge of the contribution to climate change and the challenge of being affected by climate change. Obviously you already have those two indicators of climate change index, but also environmental health index. But within the climate change one, thinking about the adaptation versus mitigation, right, those who contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, but also the vulnerability to it, which I think is considering the economic part, but I thought it would be particularly useful to have these two highlighted. In terms of governance, one question that I wanted to raise is, it's very valuable to have this effort kind of capturing the government governance challenge. But to what extent is governance or good governance a outcome of development or is it part of the process right of addressing these different challenges. And perhaps in those graphs at the end of the report are particularly insightful. And I was wondering whether it's also possible to keep kind of pushing this work to do something, which is also part of us, where you know kind of looking at how countries move over time, and whether it's good governance that comes first, and then the other challenges get resolved as a consequence, or is it the other way around that kind of good governance is also part of the process of resolving those those challenges. And then in terms of the just I want to remain brief so I know I'm sure there's a lot of time for the Q&A so that just the other things I was going to mention terms of the, the operational use of this tool, which has so much potential to really helping us understand developing challenges, and particularly in terms of so it seems maybe to use a bad metaphor that you have this index is a Ferrari by then it's being driven to 100 kilometers per hour already. So I'm just kind of thinking about adding the extra 20 kilometers per hour. And so so far you have the kind of, you know, mashup index I'm wondering whether to what extent you'd be useful to represent as well the data in terms of shapes, right and measure countries in terms of, you know, the, how well, so basically the shape of the index based on those different indicators, and whether the shape can help us categorize countries into different case scenarios, right in terms of the different challenges we're dealing with. And based on this data, looking at how basically pattern how patterns evolve all the time, right if a country that is in a particular challenge, historically right what have been the movements across the different countries. And that can help us better understand, you know, which challenges are necessary to resolve before, you know, being able to resolve all the challenges right so that leads back to discussion on governance, but also on the whole question about the economic and environmental challenges right is possible to to address them both at the same time, or historically have countries that they're better in terms of environmental health challenge had to grow first before sorting those issues. And, and yeah so basically the kind of idea of looking at this data multi dimensionally as well, right because it is a multi dimensional index, but then over time to be able to conduct a pattern and movement analysis and help us understand the sequencing of solving development challenges. So I think that's all for now. On my side but thank you very much for for very insightful presentation and, and I really look forward to seeing the next steps of what's been done with this index by yourself but also by others, researchers and policymakers that will use it and inform their policies and research on based on your data. Thank you. And there are already some questions coming from my mirror so what we will do is once we move to the Q&A we will, you will be able to answer some of these questions so we're now going to listen to Sabina. Thank you so much so a very warm congratulations to the team at Esquire for really what I think is a groundbreaking report. And so I'd like to begin with a quote. And it is, in a sense, only on one of the, the several themes that are covered. But it's the theme of the democracy and political freedom and see if you remember when this is from. And, but it speaks about. Sorry, just lost it. And we can see you. So the 1991 human development report. Followed the 1990 launch of course. And of course the first chapter was on the human development index and on the findings of that year and the trends. But the second part of that was trying to introduce the concepts of human freedoms and really understand what these were. In 1992, the report that second chapter said that the purpose of human development is to increase people's range of choices. If they are not free to make those choices, the entire process becomes a mockery. So freedom is more than an idealistic goal. It is a vital component of human development. People who are politically free can take part in planning and decision making. They can ensure that society is organized through consensus and consultation, rather than dictated by an autocratic elite. It also recognizes that democratic rule can never be perfect. It needs constant injections of energy and effort, and it demands patient renewal. But the focus on democracy can ensure that insofar as is possible, a country's development is truly people centered. And if you think of the human development reports that Salim led and that others have led through the year, because this is a global report, you will remember that this has been a theme that recurred. 1992 is what I read from 1993 with focus on people's participation, 2002 on deepening democracy, and so on. And in 1992, they also tried to do the human freedom index, but it didn't quite fly. And so one part of the novelty of the development challenges index has been to put on to a solid footing, this articulation of freedom. And the second component, obviously, is the environmental one, which seems so evident to us now. And it is indeed, you know, the focus of the 2020 human development report on human development and Anthropocene. But also since the 1998 report on consumption, the 2007 eight on fighting climate change 2011 on sustainability, there have been 2014 on sustaining progress. There have been many human development reports that looked at this issue, and probably each time thought about measurement. But I think that really one of the one of the advantages of the development challenge of index is that it's taking these themes that are central to the concept of human development, and then building an index that is admittedly imperfect, but is using very rigorous and clear and transparent method tools to try to bring these back into the conversation in a coherent way. And I think we would all agree that that the time is ripe for that. So, the first thing is that they had to all of you I think that that's really an achievement and it's something that I think that will have important, you know, into the future as as these ideas roll out. I would also say that the, I'd like to divide comments into sort of neighboring indicators and methodology. So I'll start with methodology which is boring bit, and then I'll get back to some of the other bits towards the end, but methodologically because of course what I do is I read the paper, because that's what I understand best. And first of all, I'd like to congratulate the authors on writing a paper that says what the index is. It's easy to follow based on it. I could almost replicate the index precisely. And that's something that many global indices do not do. They don't give you sufficient detail to replicate the index and that's important to engage students. It's important to invite criticism. It's important, you know, so that people understand what you're doing. So that was very good. For those of you who haven't read the 219 robustness tests or the different tests for changing of weights, changing of indicators, a treatment of missing. Let me just say that these tests were done and the results of the final index in a sense have been assessed against them and those are well documented. The other observation methodologically is that it's transparent about the missing indicators and if the indicator is not available that year, then it's published what year the data are from, which is again a step forward. And if it is imputed, then that is also mentioned. And that my understanding is that every country has some number for each of the indicators. If I didn't get that right, I'd love check.  How do you test that against Atkinson? But these are very minor things. And the last technical observation I would have is a little bit of a suggestion going forward that's a little bit serious and it comes from James Foster and it's very tiny. But you say that indicators are standard using the regular min-max formula, which is the minimum minus the maximum of that year's tranche of data. But James Foster has shown that when you have a moving maximum, it breaks some of the properties.  And so I would have a little bit of a suggestion that maybe you consider also having a fixed maximum because then that just permits interoperability across different reports and time periods rather than having to recompute all of the measures and all of the trends each year. So that would be a small suggestion methodologically, but I really enjoyed that. I think my comments are predictably on your neighbors. So first of all, I found it was quite interesting to look at how this Development Challenges Index related to the Human Development Index, the Social Progress Index, etc. I was interested in because of the emphasis in the report on conflict and observations about development challenges and conflict, whether the Global Peace Index and the eight pillars of positive peace might be another to engage with in a future report, a future study. Obviously working on multidimensional poverty, it would be interesting to see if the Human Development Challenges Component tracked and just trained spotting countries that were labeled on your spread charts and looking a bit in the back. There's clearly a good relationship, though the years differ and so we have to interpret much more carefully. But there are also other indicators, whether it's legato and prosperity or whether it's a single dimensional environment, one whether it's the environmentally adjusted to HDI that came out in 2020. So it might be interesting in a future study, you know, to have a wider neighborhood conversation with other indicators of this type. But perhaps going beyond the scatter plot to really looking at which each of the indicator, which each of them add, what's the value added, what are the divergences. I think that that a little bit closer analysis would really do some interesting work and also having a bit of a methodological talk about data, dates, etc. The next point, and I just have two more, is that development challenges are vast.  And then if you add voice and governance, and you add environment, it's some of the dimensions of the Thiglet's San Francisco Commission, but not all. It's some of the dimensions of the National Happiness Index, but not all. And so there would be other domains, whether it's psychological well being that could be mental health, positive negative emotions, evaluative life satisfaction, etc. There might be something about relationships, social isolation, meaningful interactions, social capital, etc. There may be time use, maybe culture in the arts. I'm not suggesting that these be an index that, you know, that it should be packed with all of these. But I think a recognition that actually what the development challenges index does is it broadens two steps, two big steps towards a multi dimensional well being measure. And there are literatures, I think that would be able to talk to that and also say, well, then what happens if we put it alongside some other exogenous indicator of global health or something. And the last observation is just data that this is a measure that mathematically could be disaggregated. And so Khaled mentioned the possibility of having national adaptations of this. And especially, for example, using the Atkinson inequality adjustment means again you've retained some national decomposability. And so it would be, I think indeed very interesting to go subnational in some countries to do some trials of that. And a question would be, you know, are the data existing? Is there a call for some of these data to be available subnational or what would you do in particularly in the governance indicators to have these kind of data. But I think that that could be quite interesting. But if that is a little bit of a step too far, if a bit of ambitious, you could also in a sense do a global aggregate and then slice and dice and not just by country. By climate, by different dimensions that you would argue that data are representative by and you might be able to do that. So just some, some different possibilities to use the data set that you have, but with different groupings than the world regions, which I think are important and it's a fantastic place to start. You know, coastal area, landlocked area, small, old, dated democracy, you know, you could think of lots of variables where you could conflict situations where you could slice and dice this and see what you learn. So I know that I'm a little bit greedy. I always want more, but it's because I think that this has been a very innovative and rigorous exercise. I think it's something that's necessary. And I believe it'll have a future. And so it's perhaps a backhanded compliment, but I look forward greatly to what comes next. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. So I think we are now ready to take some questions from from the audience. We already have a number of questions from our discussions. And we will take them later. So we're going to collect some from the audience here. And I think there might be some questions in the Zoom chat. I'm not sure about that, but you, you can tell us. There's one question here. Just wait for the minute. Thank you. Let's identify yourself. I'm Ming. I'm a student at SOAS. Okay. Thank you. I'm at development study department. I have two questions and maybe a bit specific. On the quality of education, I see that the index is about years of schooling. Is it possible also to reflect like the quality of education, like what's been taught? Like the school, the education, do they, like the country, do they encourage or disencourage critical thinking? A second question is about the governance index. Would it, I'm just thinking, would it change quickly with the change of government within a country? Would they change the index? For example, like America with the Donald Trump ending, does it change the index of the governance index of America? Thanks. Hi, my name is Muska and I'm an economic student at SOAS. I just wanted to kind of ask on why kind of the environment and health. So for example, the environmental impacts was only linked to health. And for example, in asking like waste and air quality. And if you're trying to improve health, has it been proven that for example that, you know, would improving the environment actually improve health outcomes? Or is there more significant indicators like access to nutritious diets and medical care? Not that we shouldn't improve the environment, but the fact that the actual impacts of the environment, the major impact in my opinion, I think most environmental scientists is not really kind of a local issue of like a factory producing waste and then the local area suffering from that. But it's more so that carbon would be released and global warming and then you'd have increased, you know, extreme weather patterns.  And that would happen more and more frequently. So it was just more so that to kind of explain the choice of why health and environment was so, you know, very closely linked here whereas in my opinion, I'm not really qualified that they'd be better dealt with separately. Thank you. Any other questions? There's one question there and another there. Can you speak up a little bit? Hi, I'm Noha. I'm a student at LSE. I was curious, you were talking about inequality and I was curious to know how do you, not how do you measure it, but in inequality it's important to have an intersectionality of all of the vectors affecting the inequality. For example, in education you should consider race, gender, ethnicity and everything. However, it becomes so complex, so sometimes you need to disregard some of the vectors. So how would you deal with a problem like this one? Thank you. Thank you all for the presentation. My name is Bethaina. I'm a final year PhD student at SOAS in Development Economics. So my question is about using challenge as the unit. So a challenge for one country may not be a challenge for another country. For example, while COVID was a global challenge, some countries had a bigger capacity to deal with it than others, so it was less of a challenge. So I wonder how that is accounted for in this index. Thank you. Okay, shall we take this? Do you have any from Zoom? Yeah, there are like two questions on Zoom. So Dibora from Nigeria is asking, how can good governance and a resilient economy prevent an environmental natural disorder? A case study of Nigeria who has had 450 of its 775 local governments in 36 states overtaken by rising floods in the last one month and some communities completely submerged underwater. And there is another question by Aiden Michael. And it is if and how women's rights is treated or addressed in this report. Over to you. Don't look at me. Go ahead. Sorry. There is one more question on Zoom. Sorry. Given that this is by PAM, given the fundamental role of good nutrition in human development, I am surprised this is not mentioned in the index. Could this be included as a health indicator? And they are so as alumni from 2007. Well, thank you so much. I mean, this has been very interesting. I would like to first of all thank Amir and Sabina for their very encouraging and fruitful remarks. And as Salim said, I mean, we know how difficult this is and we don't expect any index to be perfect, let alone one that tries to really take on very complex issues and ones that are very difficult to measure. We try to address some of the more difficult questions. Salim, I mean, it has mentioned two major remarks. One on the issue of environmental sustainability and the balance between adaptation, mitigation, consumption, production. We have had lots of discussions on this. We try to the best of our ability to balance between the production and consumption. So you'll see that there is a carbon emissions indicator is also material footprint indicator there.  And we try, we want our option was to try to include renewables, but the data when you look at the kernel distribution was really bad. I mean, so that's one of what Sabina mentioned that we had to do a lot of trials and tests to be able to include an indicator. And when the data looked very, I mean, conflict, for example, even as a correlation variable is very difficult because conflict is a continuous variable is not there for most countries. And we've only had it categorically. And there are some major statistical challenges when you do this work. So it has been difficult, but we've reflected all of these debates. And I take note of Sabina's point because we reflected all of these debates and we tried as much as possible to be transparent about them in the technical background. So if you go to the technical background papers, you'll see a lot of answers to this question. Your fundamental question, I mean, is the sequencing issue, which of these challenges are more important? I think there was another question about these challenges could be more important for one country, one region. And yes, of course, there's no doubt about that. Is governance, is good governance part of the definition of human development outcomes goals, or is it a causal factor? I take, we take the position that it is a fundamental part of the definition of human development and development at large. And I think Sabina alluded to that. And this is a, you know, it's not, it is also an enabler. It's a very important enabler, but it's also a fundamental right. And when you take that position, you have to include it in the measure. And in fact, that has been all along in the development of the concept. And I think Salim can talk about the early on debates on how to operationalize the human development index. There were many chapters devoted to that issue right from the very start. There was a recognition that fundamentally you need to include freedoms and human rights in the very fabric of your measure. The challenge was how to do so. And it still is a major challenge, because how do you measure governance without expert opinion? And once you get into expert opinions, then how do you standardize them? So it's a difficult issue, and there's no perfect way to do it. We try to the best of our ability. But of course, the sequencing issue is fundamentally important at the national level and at the regional level. So I agree with you on that, that there are some regions for which the sequence would matter. And of course, the developed region is very different to the developing one. So moving on to Sabina, thank you Amir very much. Moving on to Sabina, the data could be disaggregated at the sub-national level. That would be a dream. I know at the MPI that Sabina is one of the best slides that Sabina likes to show is when you disaggregate the multi-dimensional poverty index at the district or even village level in some cases. I wish that we could do that, but you would have to then think about these. You'd probably have to retailer the index to country specifics in order to do that. And that's something that we're open for. But it would be also an encouragement if countries can design surveys that would take that into account. So it's potentially doable, I think, but it would depend on the country specifics. When we have a moving max, consider the fixed max, yes, that has been also part of the debate. How do you fix the max? And the means are usually more easier, but the maximum values of an index is usually very controversial. What is the maximum on life expectancy? Is it the observed maximum? We know that there's progress historically and we expect that progress to continue even at a slower pace because we're reaching the limit unless some kind of technological revolution happens that makes us live a decade longer on average. So these have all been discussed and we tend to leave. We follow the Human Development Index and their approach on this. So you basically leave some room for improvement. You're expected improvement in the future, so you don't have to go back and change over time. Neighbors and correlations with the Global Peace Index and the MPI and the Social Progress Index, which is very highly correlated with that, and that has been, I think, you're right. We need to go way beyond the scatterplot discussion and look at this with more analytical insight. And even design, and that's why I show new indices that can speak to the policy recommendations because whenever you're dealing with a composite index and you want to propose policies, you also need to think like the multi-dimensional inequality challenge. We know that inequality is a major issue and it's definitely one of the major recommendations we would like to have. And of course there was a question about gender and how it's treated in this report. And it's indirectly part of your governance indicators because when you're good on governance, you're probably going to have better gender outcomes. But that wasn't very satisfactory for us. So when we tried to go for the inequality proposal, which we're working on right now, we specifically accounted for gender inequalities. We specifically accounted for group inequalities and vertical inequalities between the rich and poor. And inequalities in wealth, which we had a whole section of working on it because we think fundamentally there is inequalities in wealth that is the major driver of inequalities and opportunities. And the studies have shown that. When you decompose your D-index, the similarity index, you look at the contributors of inequality opportunities. It's the wealth of the household and the occupation and characteristics of the head of households are usually the most important drivers in most countries across most indicators. But let me say that there are aspects that we'll never be able to. And I take your point about the issues like culture and happiness even. And when I was asked the question, what if you're living in a country in Sudan, for example, Sudanese colleague friend of mine said, you know, we're pretty happy. We don't have access to electricity all the time. We don't have this. But when I compare my lifestyle to the ones that my colleagues are having in London or New York, I'd rather be in this situation than being overburdened with debt working 13 hours a day. And that's true. And there's no pretension here that we're measuring real happiness. That's something that we're basically looking at, you know, more quantifiable and very specific aspects of development. And this is, by the way, my professor Galeh Lameen, a well-known Egyptian sociologist, that was his fundamental critique of human development as an index and human development as an approach is that it doesn't really account for happiness in the true sense of the term or even going beyond that spirituality. I mean, that's something else. We're not dealing with this in this index. So very quickly, men, quality of education, years of schooling, critical thinking. That's very tough, of course. You don't really know how to do that. But if you do well on international test scores, and we've taken that from the TIMS and other international test scores, usually they factor in critical thinking in the way that they measure. Of course, there are many problems in the way that you do that and how you can standardize across regions and the World Bank themselves admit to these problems. But it's there implicitly. So it's a difficult one, but I think it's part of the measure of the quality-adjusted education challenge in Dixiel. When countries regress on governance, is it factored in? Yes. And I think if you look at the rank of the, not because of Donald Trump, but specifically, but when you look at the rank of the United States compared to its rank on Human Development Index, you will see that there is a regression. And for a few other countries, for various reasons. And that's, again, part of the value added, I think, of this indicator is that this index is that not all developed countries are the same. There are major differences in governance systems and governance outcomes between Nordic countries and European countries and, of course, North America. I very quickly, a challenge for one country, I think, have addressed that. Women rights, I think, have addressed that as well, fundamental role. I think I'll stop here. I think, oh, the nutrition, the nutritional one, and the link between health and environment. So the link between health and the environment has been deliberate in the design of the index. So we looked at healthy life expectancy, that's our main indicators, because the philosophy is you discount your life expectancy by quality of life, and here the healthy life expectancy indicator does that already. But then what are the fundamental drivers of, or the determinants of healthy life expectancy? That's the index, and it was actually designed to answer that question. So these are the weights of that particular dimension were selected in exactly the same proportion as they are in the environmental performance, because of that. So you can argue that health has a much more implicitly, much more weight in the DCI than in the HDI. So that would be my answer to your question. Now let me stop here. I think I've addressed most of the questions. Selim, do you want to ask? I just want to make some general comments. One is that a concept is always broader and larger than the measurement. There is not a single measure, particularly in social science, which can claim that we have measured that particular concept 100%. That's not true in physical science. If we say the temperature of the room is 79, it is 79. It's neither 78 or 77. So therefore one has to remember that the index, whether it is a composite index or an indicator, what it is trying to measure cannot capture the totality of the concept there. So the development challenge index, there is no presumption or arrogance on our part that the index completely 100% measures the development challenges. That's number one. Number two is that I know, I don't know how many of you are from statistics, but statisticians have a habit of if they have any numbers, they just want to put it into a kind of an index. But remember that every sustainable, robust index has a very strong analytical framework. The human development index has an analytical framework. The multidimensional poverty index also has a very strong analytical framework. So therefore when you look at the development challenge index, don't get bogged down in the index itself or too excited about the index itself. Try to find out what is the kind of analytical thinking that has gone into coming up with that index. Because if you don't do that, then you miss the totality of the picture. So that's the second thing. Third thing is about the composite index. Should every indicator be thrown into the composite index to make it a kind of a salad, or we should try to make a composite index on some of the strategic indicators and then keep the rest of the indicators as a kind of a dashboard or as a kind of a table so that they would be complementary to the development challenge index. I think in future, as we are listening to you and others, there is a demand of putting everything into the development index. That's not going to happen and that's not going to do the index any kind of justice. Because the more you throw into the composite index, the less it becomes robust and it also loses its predictive power. So therefore one of the things that we have to do in future that yes, this is the minimum basics we will put into the development index. There will be other indicators which we will try to put it either in terms of a dashboard or in some forms so that they can be complementary to that. I think Sabina has made two very important points. The first one is it is absolutely necessary as much as possible to desegregate the index. Because as we all know that an index, an average index, masks all kinds of disparities or differences. And you know that famous joke that half of your body may be in the oven, the other half is in the refrigerator and on average you'll be comfortable. So therefore I think it is absolutely important to desegregate because that will also unmask it and desegregated indices are the major instrument to the policymakers. Because then they know what needs to be done in what area, what region or what countries wants to have different kind of treatment in terms of policies. The other point that Sabina has made, and I think we have to think about it, we thought about it in HDI and we tried to fix it, is that if your max and minimum are observed, then your scale is changing all the time. So whenever you are measuring something, the changes, is it because of real changes have happened or because of your scale has changed? Now in terms of the minimum as Khalid pointed out, there is less problem. In terms of maximum also you can make some assumptions. Life expectancy, the way we dealt with HDI, suppose the life expectancy average or the highest in Norway is now 85, if we say that the maximum of life expectancy would be 90 in 10 years, what is the harm? So using certain subjective notion you can fix that maximum. But as Sabina has pointed out that unless you fix that problem of maximum and minimum, your measurement actually will be a little bit faulty, particularly when you are trying to compare it over time, or you are trying to compare it across countries. So that would be something that we have to deal with. My final point is that there are certain things which cannot be measured and which should not be measured. I love my child, I challenge you, give me a mathematical formula that can really represent our number or indicator, that can really represent that fundamental statement that I love my children. So therefore there are certain things which actually we should talk about it, we should highlight about it, but don't put it in kind of a measurement or index actually, because then you lose the strength, the depth of that particular concept. For example, the whole question of culture, how you are trying to measure it. The whole question of the context of a particular country in terms of heritage, how can you measure it. So I think it is very important to mention them, to set the context of development challenges and measurement of development outcomes, but don't try to put all of those things which are very qualitative, which are very subjective into some kind of a quantifiable measurement, because then we lose the perspective and we also lose the context of it. My final one point, be very clear in your mind whatever you are trying to measure, because in many cases I have seen the things that people want to measure and what they actually measure are not the same thing. So be very careful and very clear what you want to measure. I think once you do that, the measurement may not be perfect, but the measurement would be useful and meaningful. Thank you. I would like to give a floor to Natasha for any final additions to these comments. She has the camera off. Hi, so I couldn't hear the last thing. We just wanted to give you the floor if you want to add any comments to the responses or those questions. I had a few things. Let me just close the door really quick. Everyone can hear me okay. I was just going to comment on whether or not the change in government changes the index. I completely agree with what Khaled already said. It does impact the index. It can impact it for the better or for the worse. I mean, we think of the common example of Donald Trump, but also you have a positive example of what happened in Ecuador after Korea left office and Lenin Moreno took over and reimplemented some democratic reforms. So it can really go up or down and I think that the index can cover these things. I just had a quick comment on the good governance and preventing an environmental disaster. It is really critical to have good governance in preventing environmental disasters and all kinds of natural disasters as well. There are really good studies on the importance of good governance in preventing death tolls with earthquakes. Good governance like, for example, in the Cayman Islands has been incredibly important in curbing the death toll from hurricanes. And we have examples of all kinds of work for flood mitigation and dealing with all kinds of disasters where good governance is really critical. I mean, that's all I think the questions that were addressed about governance address. I do agree with the comments from the discussants. And I just will address what Amir had said about that relationship between development and governance. And it is one that we have discussed quite a bit and as we've said, and I have to agree with Khaled, how important governance is to development. But we see how important it is to have the will to implement good governance and how other things can follow. And a lot of this is just affected by a lack of will to adhere to what we know is good governance. And when this happens, we do see that there can be a lot of positive long term impacts to development. And that's all for me. Thank you, Natasha. Okay, I think it's already quarter past seven, so I'm just going to close the event with a few remarks of my own. I think it was a really enjoyable event and a very, very important topic. I just wanted to make a few final comments drawing from the different interventions in the launch. I think it is actually quite remarkable that a report of these characteristics, a global report with a new global index comes from a regional office in the U.N. And it's a testament of the technical quality of the team that you managed to assemble and also all the people who've contributed from outside. I think it's a really major achievement also knowing your budget constraints. When I was coming to the launch, I bumped into a colleague who was asking me, where are you going? I said, well, I'm going to this launch event on a new development index. And the colleagues say, oh, another multi-dimensionally index rather skeptically. And I think this question has been raised here as well. And I think some of your responses have been really useful in terms of managing this kind of debate because we have it in class here. We're constantly dealing with the issue of how do we measure development. We have all these multiple indices, which one is the best one and why. I think what's clear is that there is no arrogance in the process as Salim puts it. And this is part of the process. And every index and every effort really contributes in one way or another to new insights and new ways of understanding questions of measurement, but also broader conceptual, big conceptual debates on development. I think what really matters is that everyone understands, as Salim pointed out, what has been measured and why. What is the analytical and normative framework that underpins these different indices and therefore being able to use different indices according to the way they've been formulated. Some might ask whether is this going to replace the Human Development Index at some point? Probably not. Maybe yes. But I think one comment that Sabina made in her intervention was quite pertinent on this question, which is actually what we need is a little bit more of a dialogue between the different indices. Different indices do different jobs and they contribute in different ways. Can we do sort of class analysis of these different indices in what ways they do they contribute and why? And I think one major contribution in this particular index is the opportunity that it gives to explore the dynamic interactions between the different dimensions that you have in the index. So the questions that Amir was raising on how governance progress in terms of governance indicators is linked to the environmental challenges, to income challenges, and also whether are we in a world of preconditions of development or do we mostly talk about co-evolution of changes in these different indicators. So I think this opens up this kind of conversation, which I think is central for us teaching students about measuring development but also more broadly in the international development community. I think some challenges that you will probably face for anyone who works on indices and I always raise this issue is raw data. The sources of data unfortunately are uneven. You will have very high quality data for some countries and low quality data for all the countries. These will not be equally distributed across dimensions and indicators and this is the kind of challenge that everyone working on indices will face. I think that's one that I see as a major challenge. And also remembering our experience with the Moibra index in the context of Africa and the reactions of governments when they don't like where they're ranked and they don't like what the index is saying in terms of progress or lack of progress and I think that's another one that might arise in the future. But thank you very much for this presentation, for the report, for the index and for being here and for choosing sides to launch your report. We're really grateful. Thank you.


Throughout my life, I've increasingly found that reading scripture in public isn't just about feeding our own spirits and minds. It's about rehearsing the mighty acts of God for God's glory. So let's think together about 2 Corinthians 5, 21, and first, we're going to need some tea. The Messiah did not know sin, but God made him to be sin on our behalf, so that in him we might embody God's faithfulness to the covenant. If you're used to reading or hearing the Bible read, you may well be surprised at that translation of 2 Corinthians 5, 21, because the more normal translation would be something like, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And generations of Christian interpreters have seen that in terms of us lacking righteousness, how can we stand before God unless we are righteous, but somehow God giving us His righteousness in terms of moral goodness. I understand the truth that is underneath that interpretation, but it is not what Paul has in mind here. Paul as so often has Isaiah and the Psalms in mind when he's talking about righteousness and particularly God's righteousness. And in Isaiah and the Psalms, the righteousness of God is God's faithfulness to the covenant. God has promised that he will do certain things. His righteousness is that he keeps those promises, so that Israel appeals to God's righteousness when they're in trouble in the Psalms and says, because you are righteous, you have promised to look after us and rescue us. So please now get on and do it. So why would Paul say here that in Christ, in the Messiah, we, we apostles, we who are preaching the gospel might embody God's faithfulness to the covenant? Well, in 2 Corinthians, from chapter 3 all the way through to chapter 6, Paul is explaining the meaning of a apostleship. What he says here does become true of all believers, but he is very specifically explaining to the Corinthians who were rather critical of his style of apostleship that this is what it looks like actually to be part of God's ongoing covenant purposes. The verses immediately before this are all about Paul's own ministry. God has reconciled us to himself through the Messiah and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That's verse 18. And then in verse 19, God was reconciling the world to himself through the Messiah and entrusting that message to us. So he's constantly saying, this is what God did in the Messiah, this is what God is now doing in us and through us. And therefore, he says, verse 20, we are entreating people on behalf of the Messiah to be reconciled to God. What does that look like when Paul is at work? Well, he describes it in chapter 4 and in chapter 6 and then again vividly in chapter 11. It looks like being thrown into jail. It looks like being beaten up. It looks like being vilified and spat upon. It looks like being shipwrecked. It looks like being the kind of apostle that Paul found he was called to be. How did he explain that? I reference constantly to Jesus himself, that Jesus was faithful to God's covenant by obeying the will of God, even when in Gethsemane he said, surely there is some other way, nevertheless not my will but yours. And Jesus went the way of suffering. He went the way of the cross. And Paul says in chapter 4 and then again in chapter 6 that it is this Jesus-shaped ministry which is given to him as an apostle. As a result, he is not only modeling who Jesus was and what Jesus did. He is embodying in himself the fact that God is faithful to the covenant. How can we be sure that that's the implication that he wants us to hear? Because just a couple of verses later, he quotes from Isaiah 49 when he says, now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation. And as often in Paul, when you have one verse quoted from the Old Testament, you have to pan back and see the larger picture. And Isaiah goes on immediately, I have given you as a covenant to the peoples, a light to those who sit in darkness. That's the vocation to which Paul was obedient. And so he says, I urge you therefore not to accept the grace of God in vain. Recognize that God has given us apostles to embody his covenant faithfulness and live within that apostolic message, live within that covenant faithfulness. How has that been worked out? Well, the first half of verse 21 says it all. Every time Paul mentions the death of Jesus, he says something slightly different about it. But this time it's the Messiah did not know sin, but God made him to be sin on our behalf. This is the worldwide promise of God that the sinless Jesus, the sinless Messiah, was the one upon whom the sins of the world were laid. So that the covenant faithfulness promises of Isaiah 49 and similar passages all lead the eye forward to the death of the servant in Isaiah 53, which Paul is here alluding to. It is that work that then fans out again in Isaiah 54 with the renewal of the covenant and the renewal of the creation in Isaiah 55. That's the whole sequence of isianic thought to which Paul is referring, which he sees as having come true in Jesus and is now being worked out through his own apostleship. This verse therefore is not, as is often thought, a detached statement of a doctrine of salvation. It belongs where it is within the sweep of Second Corinthians as a whole, as a way of saying this is what apostolic ministry looks like. This is what it looks like to embody the covenant faithfulness of God. So may God give you grace and strength to embody in yourselves the promises which he has made to you and through you, to be yourselves faithful to his calling and to bring his joy and purposes to birth in his world. Amen.