Zawaya

The Human Development Index (HDI): A tool to know where we stand, or a geopolitical element?

By: Baya Gacemi

All countries, including the Maghreb ones, eagerly await each year the publication of the UN ranking of countries according to their human development index (HDI).

It is only normal that everyone is curious about their level in human development compared to others. It is indeed important to know what stage of development a country has reached.

In reality, all countries know in which category they are. What really interests them is to not fall into a lower category. An increase in ranking, however, makes them very pleased since it helps the government in power maintain its position and run for another term. This is true of course for the Maghreb countries, which are very jealous of one another, even if they claim that this classification is biased and only reflects the Western vision of the world.

Maghreb countries actually keep an eye on their respective rankings only to see whether they are worse off than their “brothers”. What matters to them is to not be supplanted by their neighbors. This is particularly true for the two eternal rivals, Morocco and Algeria.

They take pleasure in remaining in their positions in the middle category without feeling any shame about the fact that countries that are much smaller, less populated, and without any natural resources, such as Lebanon or Tunisia, are ranked higher than them.

Such is the plight of these countries’ peoples. Their leaders do not take account of these HDI to address their policies and attempt to improve the living conditions of their fellow citizens, but instead use them as power tools on the geopolitical level. In Algeria, for example, even if there has been a significant progress between 1975 and 2005 according to the UN classification; people’s living conditions have been stagnating or even regressing in the last years, while the country’s financial resources have actually increased.

The serious part in this issue is that the quality of life has been deteriorating on a daily basis in the country, certainly more than it has in Morocco which is ranked far behind, and this fact can only be actually measured by Algerian citizens who go through this every day.