Why Does Ireland Still Do So Badly on the UN's Human Poverty Index?

Each year, the publication of the Human Development Report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is marked by newspaper headlines and media attention in Ireland - most recently, on the publication of the 2002 Report (UNDP, 2002) during this summer. This attention is stimulated not so much by the wealth of information these reports present about the situation of the 80 per cent of the world's population living outside the highest-income countries, and the messages it seeks to convey about how to improve the situation of the poorest in particular. Instead it focuses more on Ireland's ranking among the high-income countries. In particular, it highlights the fact that on one headline measure of poverty Ireland is still second-last among seventeen rich countries, despite our recent unprecedented economic growth. Why does Ireland still do so badly, and how seriously do we take this ranking? This paper, in setting out to answer those questions, looks in some detail at how this summary poverty measure is constructed and what the results for Ireland reflect.