Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Human Development Index: Canada Drops Out Of Top 10 As Rest Of World Catches Up

After spending much of the 1990s in first place, and the next decade in a slow decline, Canada has now dropped entirely out of the top 10 on the UN’s Human Development Index.

Canada ranks 11th place in the 2013 edition of the index, released on Thursday, down from 10th place in the previous report.

The United States, which for many years was well below Canada on the index, ranked third this year.

Canada also declined on an alternative measure that looks at inequality, falling to 15th place. On that ranking, Canada is still ahead of the U.S., which sits at 16th place.

But the people behind the report say the downward trend for Canada isn’t as much about the country declining as it is about other countries improving their human development levels more quickly.

The data “actually shows Canada’s performance slightly improved … but other countries improved more,” Human Development Report spokesman Bill Orme told HuffPost. “It’s not as if Canada has declined in any meaningful way.”

Among the countries improving more quickly than Canada are Australia and Japan, as well as South Korea, which Orme identified as a particularly quickly-rising country.

Orme also warned against comparing this year’s index against other years, because the data used to calculate the index is often revised, so data for previous years may be based on numbers no longer considered valid.

The main finding of the report is positive, that some of the world's poorest countries are consistently improving areas such as life expectancy, school attendance and per capita income.

Even the countries at the bottom of the list, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are among those who showed the greatest improvement.

"No country for which complete data was available has a lower HDI value now than it had in 2000," the report stated.

The index looks primarily at wealth levels, education and life expectancy to determine a country's development level.

Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.ca
Author:  Daniel Tencer

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