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5. The Economics of Human Rights and MDGs in

Practice

Milan Brahmbhatt and Otaviano Canuto

The last two decades have seen a growing engagement between development and human rights

practitioners and thinkers. But is this still, as many fear, a dialogue of the deaf? Are we still talking

mainly past each other? Or is it the case that, as we think, there has been valuable cross-fertilization

and learning both at the theoretical and operational levels, the Millennium Development Goals

(MDGs) themselves being in some sense a fruit of this growing convergence. We on the development

practitioners‟ side have certainly benefited from this engagement. It will be interesting to hear from

human rights practitioners whether they too see matters in this light.

This paper addresses three points. The first is the growing convergence between human rights and

development thinking along several dimensions. The second looks at continued areas of difference or

divergence, and outstanding or open questions. Are these areas of conflict or are they valuable

complementarities? And, lastly, where are we with MDGs “on the ground”? What is the outlook for

2015 and beyond? And what can the dialogue between human rights and development contribute to

furthering progress on MDGs?

1. Convergence

Arguably there are now several areas of convergence between human rights and development. Here

it is useful to start with a basic definition – this one adapted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy – of human rights as international norms that help to protect all people everywhere from

severe political, legal, economic and social abuses, or, alternatively, which serve to secure and

preserve extremely important goods, protections and freedoms in these various areas, for all people

everywhere.1

The first aspect of convergence that we want to note is the sheer numerousness of these rights or

norms – several dozen at this point – and how the scope of the human rights agenda has been

paralleled by a broadening of development concerns over several decades. It is instructive to quote

from the Articles of Association of the World Bank, which include:

Milan Brahmbhatt and Otaviano Canuto are, respectively, Senior Adviser and Vice President of the World

Bank‟s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) Network. 1 Nickel (2010)

2

encouragement of the development of productive facilities and resources in less

developed countries … To promote private foreign investment .. [and] … To promote

the long-range balanced growth of international trade and the maintenance of equilibrium

in balances of payments …

and to observe how the interpretation of these purposes has progressively evolved and broadened over

the decades, to the point where the Bank‟s primary purpose is now viewed as poverty alleviation,

understood as a multidimensional concept that encompasses broad areas of human development,

social development, environment, governance and institutions.

At the same time, the emphasis of human rights thinking on the rights of every individual has

contributed to, or at least been matched by, a shift in development attention from a predominant

interest in aggregate measures of welfare like GDP or average per-capita income to increasingly fine-

grained consideration of outcomes for specific sub-groups and households, to thinking about “winners

and losers”. As a result we see the emergence of greater concern with issues of inequality and

distribution, gender disparities, geographical disparities, outcomes for marginal groups and so on.

A final dimension of this convergence is the growing emphasis in development practice at the level of

operations and process on participation, consultation and accountability.

Human rights practitioners are often vocal about how – despite these convergences – development

institutions take too little, if any, account of human rights concerns in practice. It is argued, for

example, that development practitioners tend to view human rights issues only instrumentally – as

means to ends such as economic growth, rather than as ends in themselves. Human rights, it is also

noted, are almost never explicitly stated as development objectives. Instead there is a focus on vague

objectives like good governance or equity that lack precise fixed meanings of the type embodied in

concrete human rights demands.

These criticisms carry a certain bite and we will return to what development practitioners are doing or

could do to address them. But it is worth first spelling out how the convergence we have noted has

actually changed development practice over the last few decades, a process we have watched from

different perspectives at various times, as staff working for development institutions like the World

Bank or as officials representing client governments of these institutions.

Some aspects of these changes are obvious, for example the rising proportion of development lending

going to human development, governance, social development, gender and environment relative to

more traditional economic management, finance , private sector development and trade activities. At

the World Bank this increased from a little over 40 percent in the early 1990s to around 50 percent

today. (Figure 1).

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Source: World Bank data and staff estimates.

Even more striking, though, is the mini-revolution in knowledge about many areas closely linked to

the human rights agenda, and the growing tempo and sophistication of operational work in these

areas. We touch on three sectors that our own department, the World Bank‟s Poverty Reduction and

Economic Management (PREM) network, is responsible for. These three are poverty reduction and

equity, governance and gender.

It is remarkable how much more we know about poverty and income inequality than 20 years ago due

to the simple but huge online accumulation and documentation of household surveys, livings

standards measurements surveys, demographic and health surveys, employment surveys and so on – a

build-up of sheer data. The availability of this information has, in turn, stimulated an extraordinary

amount of new research on poverty and inequality, together with many new tools, models and

instruments. Thus two World Development Reports, in 2001 and 2005 synthesized the current state of

knowledge on interactions between poverty, inequality, opportunity, growth and development.2 The

Bank‟s Poverty Assessments provide a useful standard tool for undertaking evaluations of poverty and

inequality at the country level, while Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) looks at the

distributional impact of policy reforms on the welfare of different stakeholders groups, with a

particular focus on the poor and vulnerable. New analytical models have been developed to analyze

the impact of fiscal and other macro and micro policies on poverty, inequality and the MDGs, as well

2 World Bank 2001, 2005.

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

1994-97 1998-00 2001-03 2004-06 2007-09

Figure 1. World Bank Lending by Themes(% of total)

Human Development, Governance, Gender, Social

Development, Social Protection and Environment

Economic Management, Financial and Private Sector Development, Trade and Integration

Urban and Rural

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as the impact of macro and other shocks on these outcomes.3 And for those who think that

development practitioners deal only in generalities about participation and empowerment, we point to

work specifically on measuring empowerment, defining empowerment mechanisms and applying this

knowledge in such areas as provision of basic services and access to justice.

Figure 2 gives one more example of new analytical and empirical work, an index of equality of

opportunity, which takes into account both the overall opportunity available in a country or region and

the inequalities in access to that opportunity based on factors like parental income and education,

ethnicity, gender and birthplace. This exhibit measures equality of opportunity in completing 6th

grade on time in Brazilian states, showing that none has equality of opportunity in this area as good as

Chile, while several have less than Guatemala.4 On the operational side, the Bank‟s work with

countries on developing and implementing Poverty Reduction Strategies is well known.

On governance, in addition to well-known broad governance indicators based on perceptions surveys,

there are now also more precisely focused Actionable Governance Indicators, which aim to throw

light on how specific governance systems are designed, implemented and functioning. These draw, in

part, on new survey instruments such as Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys and Quantitative

3 Bourguignon and Da Silva, 2003.

4 de Barros et al, 2009.

Figure 2. Brazilian States: Opportunity Index for Completing Sixth

Grade on Time

Source: de Barros et al, 2009.

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

Piauí

Alagoas

Sergipe

Maranhão

Bahia

Pernambuco

Paraíba

Ceará

Rio de Janeiro

Rio Grande do Norte

Goiás

Mato Grosso

Minas Gerais

Mato Grosso do Sul

Distrito Federal

Espírito Santo

Rio Grande do Sul

Paraná

São Paulo

Santa Catarina

Human Opportunity Index (percent)

Chile

Brazil

Guatemala

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Service Delivery Surveys. This kind of information should be particularly useful for Human Rights

based approaches, with their primary focus on the distinction between rights-holders and duty-

bearers, and their stress on the performance of duty-bearers.

Those who think development practitioners entirely shy away from political institutions should note

the Bank‟s work on Accountability Institutions and Mechanisms, which delves into issues such as the

development role of press freedom, parliamentary reform, transparency, freedom of information and

stolen asset recovery. At the operational level the Bank‟s Governance and Anti-Corruption Strategy

draws on these and other tools “to help developing country governments, in light of their distinct

national challenges, to identify their own priorities for improving governance and to articulate and

implement programs responding to those priorities.”

We can point to similar rapid growth in all kinds of gender-related information and analysis, for

example that related to demographics, health, education, employment and political participation. The

Bank‟s World Development Report 2012 on “Gender Equality and Development” provides a

comprehensive analysis and survey of empirical evidence currently available on these issues, while, at

the operational level, its Gender Action Plan “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” takes an

explicitly rights-based approach as the way to empower women, in particular in four key markets,

land, labor, agriculture and finance.5 The Women, Business and the Law database, presents indicators

based on laws and regulations affecting women's prospects as entrepreneurs and employees, drawing

on the Gender Law Library, a collection of over 2,000 legal provisions impacting women's

economic status.

These are some examples of the ways in which development thinking and practice have evolved in

ways that enrich our knowledge and operational experience on issues of key concern for both

development and human rights. Perhaps the way it is has occurred has been too organic and

unplanned for some, leaving too many ragged, untidy edges and unanswered questions, but we think it

is valuable nonetheless.

2. Open Questions

We turn now to the areas of continued or potential divergence between human rights and

development thinkers and practitioners. Are these inevitable to some extent, in that they reflect a

necessary division of labor and useful complementarities? What are the open questions?

A frequent criticism of development practitioners is that they rarely gave sufficient explicit

prominence to human rights as ends in themselves, if at all. There is clearly some truth to this. Sen‟s

5 World Bank, 2011.

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approach of “Development as Freedom” and of expanding human capabilities as an end rather than a

means to something else deserves deeper reflection by both development and human rights

practitioners.

The World Bank is in fact undertaking a more systematic initiative, supported by a trust fund from the

5 Nordic countries, to, among other things, develop greater conceptual clarity about the links between

human rights and core Bank activities, to explore how human rights considerations can be

incorporated into and improve the effectiveness of Bank activities, in line with the priorities of

developing country partners.

What about criticisms of the human rights approach from the perspective of development

practitioners? Gauri (2005) outlines some of these concerns, in particular about the expansion of

human rights to include economic and social rights, especially where these are framed as judicially

enforceable claims. Such „rights inflation‟ might serve as a convenient cover for otherwise

undesirable „big government‟ policy agendas, for example. Courts may not be competent to evaluate

the complex chains of unintended consequences they might set off by rulings to enforce some specific

right, according to such criticisms. Judicial interference might also constrain the ability of

governments to flexibly adopt the most cost-effective policies to achieve given goals, while also

reducing their democratic accountability to the public for delivering on such goals.

Gauri concedes that if rights are understood as binding constraints on government action then it is

hard to avoid the conclusion that a human rights approach to economic and social rights such as health

care and education is “vague, impractical, or self-defeating”. But, he argues, if rights are understood

not as binding constraints but as high priority goals, then they can be meaningful and useful, bringing

to bear differences of perspective and focus that are usefully complementary to those of the

development approach. An example might be the way that human rights practitioners emphasize

participation and inclusion in public service delivery as intrinsically valuable, particularly when it is a

case of bolstering the self-esteem of long excluded social groups, while development practitioners

might emphasize the same things more instrumentally, as ways to improve information and strengthen

customer accountability.

Criticisms of the human rights approach from a development perspective are also reviewed in Mary

Robinson‟s paper “What Rights Can Add to Good Development Practice”. (Robinson, 2005).

Robinson observes that human rights bodies have also had to adjust and develop their perspectives

and approaches when grappling with the same real world issues that confront development agencies.

For example, if human rights agencies want to do concrete practical work with national governments

on issues of reform, they inevitably have to take into account the political perspectives of those

governments, much as development agencies do. Even though most countries have signed the same

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international Human Rights treaties, any reading of the discussions at the Universal Periodic Review

of the UN Human Rights Council makes clear that governments continue to have widely varying

political and philosophical interpretations of what those commitments mean and entail.

Also relevant is Robinson‟s discussion of the criticism that human rights practitioners have difficulty

coping with the resource constraints facing poor countries and the need for tradeoffs: that getting

more of one thing typically entails less of something else, an idea which is practically the mother‟s

milk of economics. In practice the force of this criticism is somewhat reduced by increasing

acceptance of the idea of progressive realization of rights. Nevertheless, as she observes, human

rights advocates do have real difficulties in making specific trade-offs because the human rights

framework is a systemic one, underpinned by notions of universality and indivisibility, and that

“unlike development, human rights is not a pragmatic tradition.”

Seymour and Pincus (2008) evaluate the potential for complementarity between the human rights and

development approaches by delving more deeply into the radically different philosophical

underpinnings of the two. Human rights theory rests firmly on deontological ethics, which judge

actions and choices according to their adherence to certain categorical duties and norms rather than by

their consequences. Economics, on the other hand, evaluates alternative public policies on the

normative basis of neoclassical welfare economics, which rests philosophically on utilitarian and

consequentialist ethics, and which has a practical application in the methodology of cost-benefit

analysis. The latter provides a common metric to evaluate trade-offs in the form of monetary

command over goods and services, but is also flexible enough to accommodate a variety of ethical

concerns, for example by giving differential weights to the interests of different social groups, or to

the „merit‟ to be attached to different types of goods, for example education or health.

Seymour and Pincus explore how different philosophical foundations lead the human rights and

economics approaches to contrasting perspectives on key aspects of development, but, nevertheless,

also argue that it may be premature to conclude that the two approaches are simply incompatible.

“…when confronted with real life choices”, they observe, “we intuitively seek to reconcile these

perspectives. Although we seek the reassurance of conformity with a priori moral principles, we also

appreciate the necessity of a metric that allows us to make choices between competing options.”

Seymour and Pincus make their key move by asserting that “Human rights is concerned with the

principles by which different choices are assessed, while economics is concerned with assessing

choices according to specified principles,” followed by the question: “does the business of choice-

making require both a normative framework like human rights and an analytical framework such as

economics?”

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Perhaps wisely, Seymour and Pincus do not directly address whether human rights provides the

normative framework for development decision-making. Instead they give examples of situations

where human rights provides a particularly useful normative complement to economics, typically

social situations that are best explained in terms of power relationships, domination, discrimination

and exploitation rather than the case of voluntary exchange between autonomous individuals that is

paradigmatic in economics – for example gender relationships within the family, or class and ethnic

divisions in a caste-based or tribal social context. At this level one can wholeheartedly endorse the

thrust of Seymour and Pincus‟ argument. When development practitioners are contemplating trade-

offs it is valuable for them to be forcefully reminded and challenged not to make those deals at the

expense of the weakest and most vulnerable in society, those who may be suffering harm in ways not

captured by the calculus of cost-benefit analysis.

One can push this further and generally welcome the way in which human rights thinking is

complicating, broadening and enriching the moral or normative framework that is an essential element

in economic decision-making. Looking forward, there is perhaps an important scholarly research

agenda to explore whether and how human rights might be incorporated in the formal theoretical

models of welfare economics. Moral philosophers have made progress in developing mathematical

languages of „deontic logic‟ that allow formal representation and analysis of human rights systems,

and this could provide an important foundation in building formal bridges to welfare economics. 6

Yet, even if and when such theoretical progress is made, one can remain skeptical whether it will ever

be possible to develop a formal „grand unified framework‟ that reconciles the human rights and

welfare economics perspectives, so deep are the philosophical differences between the respective

deontological and consequentialist foundations of the two. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is

greater awareness of and respect for each others‟ perspectives among development and human rights

practitioners, who will just have to find pragmatic ways to incorporate insights from the two

approaches in their day to day decision making, even if unsupported by any ultimate grand theory.

Something of this pragmatic spirit informs Langford (2009), which evaluates Seymour and Pincus

(2008) argument for a unitarian approach to human rights and economics in the specific case of social

security and child benefits. The idea of a right to social security is well established in the human

rights framework but has as yet been implemented in only a few developing countries. Langford

proposes a three part human rights resources test that would help evaluate whether countries have the

resources to implement a right to social security, and child benefits in particular. Interestingly, these

steps – determining the available fiscal resource envelope, evaluating possible tradeoffs with spending

on other human rights, and assessing possible externalities linked to social security spending – are

6 A survey of work on formal deontic logic is provided in Chapter 6 of Vizzard (2006), together with references

to some efforts to link deontic logic with welfare economics and the theory of decisions.

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very similar in concept and method to the fiscal space analysis or public expenditure review that a

development economist might undertake. Langford notes that a nuanced approach is needed to

determine when the human rights or economics approaches might have greater applicability. In

particular, he argues, there could be a presumption in favor of implementing a human right approach

precisely in those cases where “economic claims are ambiguous, empirically weak or strongly

contested”.

One final open question worth exploring is this: while the engagement with human rights has helped

to broaden the development agenda and adopt a more fine-grained focus on inequity and

discrimination, how far does it really help provide better, concrete answers to the hard questions

facing development practitioners about “what actually works” in “doing development”? And, how,

concretely, does a Human Rights Based Approach to development contribute to achievement of the

human rights agenda itself.

Figure 3 is drawn from an interesting presentation on the Human Rights Based Approach to

Development by Urban Jonsson.7 Here the vertical Outcome axis represents various internationally

accepted human rights standards such as eradication of hunger and malnutrition, universal primary

education and the MDGs (and, presumably, also including the political and civil rights elements of

human rights standards). On the horizontal Process axis are critical human rights principles and

processes such as equality and non-discrimination, participation and inclusion, accountability and rule

of law. The figure suggests that attempts to improve outcomes without also strengthening processes

are unsustainable and therefore doomed to failure. But so also will be mere improvements in

processes that do not result in better outcomes. The yellow line from quadrants A to C suggests an

optimal relationship or path between the two that allows a country to strengthen both outcomes and

processes in a mutually reinforcing way.

7 Jonsson, 2009.

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Figure 3. A Human Rights-Based Approach to Development

Source: Jonsson, 2009

This is a useful conceptual framework. Development practitioners have become more appreciative of

the value of accountability and other governance reforms in development (and also of causality in the

opposite direction, from better living standards and human capabilities to demands for more voice and

accountability). Yet, by itself, it remains something of an underdetermined framework. For even with

good accountability and voice institutions, vast questions will remain unanswered. How indeed do we

ensure adequate housing for all? Are tough rent controls and more public investment in housing the

way to go? Or will a more free market approach yield better results? What exactly are the health

interventions that will reduce maternal mortality, what is the government‟s role in supplying those

interventions and where will we find the resources to pay for them? Should we cut spending on

something else, raise taxes, borrow or maybe just print a bit more money? And so on.

On the other hand, it would also certainly not be correct to suggest that development practitioners

have all the answers to these tough questions. We often think we do, and can usually put forward

elaborate and powerful causal models of these linkages. But it later sometimes turns out that these

models are quite far from reality and that in some cases we have merely let ourselves get carried away

by ideological fashions rather than evidence. Indeed if there is one theme in development thinking

OUTCOME

PROCESS

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over the last decade it is the demand for more rigor and attention to evidence. Economics and other

social sciences are mostly not experimental sciences, which makes verification or disproof of

hypotheses quite difficult and mainly dependent on statistical analysis of historical patterns. Yet we

are learning that many of the statistical models of cross-country patterns that we use to buttress

various policy conclusions are less robust than we thought.

Rather than grand frameworks, the emphasis now is more pragmatic and focused on impact

evaluation: that is, on the careful assessment of how far changes in the well-being of specific

individuals, households or communities can be causally attributed to a particular project, program or

policy. We are still far from being able to apply this approach as extensively as we would like, but it

is the desired direction. And, perhaps this would be a fruitful direction for future collaboration

between development and human rights practitioners, to think about more evidence based approaches,

to work on improving data and indicators, to find what does and does not work in human rights and

development.

3. MDGs – Progress on the Ground and the Outlook

In closing we look briefly at progress on and the outlook for the MDGs. By way of backdrop we

highlight one important element that is likely to have conditioned recent performance on the MDGs,

and that is the surprisingly strong economic growth in developing countries over roughly the last

decade. While, previously, GDP growth in the developing countries as a group was similar to that in

the advanced countries, since the early 2000s it has exceeded developed country growth by 4 or 5

percentage points. Growth did fall sharply during the worst of the global recession, in 2009, but even

then remained more than 5 percentage points higher than in the advanced countries. And looking

forward most forecasters project a continued significant growth premium in favor of developing

countries. (Figure 4).

Surprisingly, this is not a question of fast growth in only a few big economies like China and India.

The growth revival of the 2000s was widespread across regions and income groups, with average

growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, exceeding 5 percent for the first time in decades.

Performance was relatively robust even in 2009, at the bottom of the global recession, with the

majority of developing countries achieving at least positive GDP growth, compared to sharp

contraction in most advanced countries. (Figure 5).

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Turning to the MDGs, the robust growth backdrop just outlined has been conducive to significant

gains in the income poverty goal of the MDGs. The global poverty headcount rate at the $1.25 a day

-6.0

-4.0

-2.0

0.0

2.0

4.0

6.0

8.0

10.0

1961

1964

1967

1970

1973

1976

1979

1982

1985

1988

1991

1994

1997

2000

2003

2006

2009

2012

Advanced countries

Developing Countries

Source: World Bank World Development Indicators and Forecasts.

-0.05

0.00

0.05

0.10

0.15

0.20

0.25

0.30

0.35

0.40

0.45

< -6% -6 to -4 -4 to -2 -2 to 0 0 to 2 2 to 4 4 to 6 > 6%

Fre

qu

en

cy

Figure 5. Frequency Distribution of GDP Growth in 2009 - Developed and Developing

GDP Growth in 2009 (%)

Developing countries (139). Median growth: +2.0%.

High Income OECD (31) Median growth: -4.0%.

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level had fallen 40 percent since 1990, reaching 25.2 percent by 2005. The global crisis has slowed

but will not prevent the developing world from meeting and exceeding the global target of halving

income poverty by 2015. As Table 1 indicates, the poverty rate for the developing world as a whole is

expected to fall to 15 percent by 2015, well below the target of 21 percent. All individual regions are

also on track, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, although, even here, poverty was falling

fairly rapidly in the 2000s, dipping from around 58 percent in 1999 to 51 percent in 2005. (It should

be noted that the goal of halving poverty is much more onerous for Africa than for other regions, since

it started out with a much higher proportion of the population below the poverty line.) Nevertheless,

the impact of the crisis on poverty has been far from negligible. An additional estimated 64 million

people will be living in poverty (at the $1.25 a day level) in 2010 as a result of the crisis, and the

number of additional poor as a result of the crisis is projected at 53 million even in 2015.8

There had also been progress towards the hunger and malnutrition goals, but the food price shock

preceding the crisis led to a notable setback. The proportion of people who suffer from hunger had

fallen from 20 percent in 1990 to 16 percent by 2005, but is estimated to have jumped to 19 percent in

2009. Although food prices fell sharply in 2009, they remain volatile and several have risen sharply

once more in 2010.

Progress on the other MDGs has been uneven. On the positive side two-thirds of developing

countries had reached gender parity in primary education by 2005 and the target of gender parity in

primary and secondary education by 2015 looks likely to be met, although countries were falling

behind on gender parity in tertiary education and empowerment of women. There was also relatively

good progress on primary school completion although the world would fall short of the target, largely

due to under-performance in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Efforts to expand access to safe

drinking water are also on track globally and in most regions. Improving access to sanitation has

proved more difficult, however. While sanitation coverage is rising, the global target will be missed.

The health goals appeared most challenging, especially for child and maternal mortality rates. Most

regions were off track, although East Asia, Latin America, and Europe and Central Asia were doing

better than others.

8 World Bank, 2010.

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Looking forward, the immediate concern is with the short and longer term impacts of the crisis on the

outlook for the MDGs. Statistical analysis suggests that the adverse impact on MDGs during

downturns tends to be larger than the benefit during upturns. Vulnerable groups like infants and

children, especially girls, are disproportionately affected. Child mortality, primary completion rates,

especially for girls, and gender parity in education especially tend to suffer. Growth in advanced

countries is also likely to be subdued for a significant period, with adverse impacts on developing

country trade and growth. And, although aid reached a record high in real absolute terms in 2008, and

although donors are pledged to significant increases, it could be that the severe fiscal pressures now

facing rich countries could lead to under-performance in practice.

Given this undoubtedly gloomier global environment, a key question is to what extent developing

countries would be able to return to the robust growth path of the 2000s. It will take more time and

evidence before we can form a well-supported view on the causes of the growth surge in developing

countries in the last decade. No doubt the boom conditions in the global economy at that time played

a part. But it is also the case that macroeconomic conditions and policies in developing countries

were in general more stable, prudent and conducive to growth than in previous decades, with

relatively low levels of external debt (partly because of debt relief initiatives), high foreign exchange

reserves, modest budget deficits, restrained inflation, more openness to absorption of foreign

knowledge, and so on.

If developing countries are able to sustain this kind of positive enabling environment, then most

development analysts would expect them to be able to also secure relatively good rates of growth

going forward, if not at the boom pace of the 2000s. One of the fundamental underlying reasons

relates to the so-called “advantages of backwardness” – the fact that most developing countries are

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still far below the level of technology available in advanced countries, and would be able – given a

good enabling environment – to raise their productivity fairly rapidly by absorbing already existing

knowledge from abroad, rather than having to invent it for themselves. The rapid growth of south-

south trade and investment flows among developing countries would be another supportive factor.9

Granted that human rights are a good-in-themselves, are they also a part of the positive enabling

environment for economic growth that developing countries need to strengthen in the present very

troubled global economic environment? Broadly speaking, the empirical research on this question

returns the answer “yes”. The evidence is particularly compelling as regards economic freedom

(rights to acquire and hold private property, undertake voluntary exchanges and so on). In a survey of

33 empirical studies de Haan, Lundström and Sturm (2006), for example, conclude that overall that

market-oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to growth.

There has been less theoretical and empirical consensus on the relationships between political

freedom, civil liberties and growth, although more recent studies increasingly find positive links.

Sorting out the links between various kinds of human rights and growth can be complicated because

the causal relationships between growth and various types of human rights can run in both directions,

and there may also be direct causal relationships between the various types of human rights. Aixala

and Fabro (2009) provide a useful Granger-causality analysis of these relationships. We illustrate

some of their results in Figure 6. The study finds that civil liberties, for example, have a positive two-

way relationship with economic growth, while also having a positive (one-way) impact on economic

freedom. Political rights appear to have an especially potent influence, displaying positive (one way)

causal influence on growth and civil liberties, as well as a positive two-relation with economic

freedom. Persson and Tabellini (2007) and Papaioannou and Siourounis (2008) are two recent studies

that confirm the positive impact of political rights on growth, finding transitions to democracy to be

worth on average one percentage point more in medium and long term growth. Chauffour (2011)

surveys the recent human rights and growth literature and confirms the empirical findings of

significant positive relationships between growth, economic freedom and civil and political liberties.

9 Canuto and Giugale (2010) make the case for a relatively robust post-crisis outlook in developing countries,

and for the kinds of policies needed to support it.

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Overall, we are led to a guardedly optimistic outlook for the progressive realization of economic

development, MDGs and broader human rights goals in developing countries, despite the present

economic difficulties in much of developed world. The presence of various virtuous circles (positive

two way linkages) between growth and human rights suggests the benefits for developing countries of

incorporating core human rights goals not only as ends in themselves but also as a part of

development strategy. We hasten to add that more growth by itself would by no means guarantee

these outcomes. Governments would need to pay close attention to ensure that the fruits of growth

were equitable distributed, and that additional resources were adequately and effectively channeled

into supporting human development and other elements of the development and social inclusion

agenda. Development partners would continue to play an important role, both by helping to mobilize

aid resources from advanced countries, as well as, perhaps more importantly, helping countries to

synthesize and apply the best available development knowledge and policies, so as to quickly

accomplish their development and human rights objectives.

Finally, with the first period of the MDGs coming to a conclusion, there is growing discussion as to

the form the Goals should take in subsequent years. Among the strategic options suggested by some

is greater incorporation of human rights goals and participatory processes in a future version of the

MDGs. Langford (2010), for example, recommends greater participation in the MDG target setting

process itself, greater incorporation of human rights perspectives into the existing goals, a broadening

of focus to aim for equality not just average improvements and strengthening of accountability

mechanisms. Others, for example Bourguignon et al (2010), while supporting a greater strategic

Figure 6. Human Rights and Growth: Virtuous Circles

Civil Liberties Economic Freedom

Economic Growth

Political Rights

Source: Aixala and Fabro (2009); Table1.

17

focus on equity and voice issues at the national and global levels, resist incorporating them into the

MDG framework, which they think will fare best as a minimal set of goals to which all or most of the

international community will subscribe. They recommend a greater focus on adapting the MDGs for

the great heterogeneity of developing conditions and on much deeper understanding of the

development strategies needed to accomplish the existing goals in these diverse conditions. The

outcome of these debates remains to be seen.

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