World development challenges

The present chapter offers a bird’s-eye view of regional and global development challenges based on DCI scores and the evolution of index components over the past two decades. It finds that sub-Saharan Africa followed by the Arab region and South Asia are the most challenged regions worldwide. A large gap separates them from their nearest neighbours, Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and the Pacific.

There are notable global and regional differences in the acuteness of the three challenges captured in the DCI, related to quality-adjusted human development, environmental sustainability and governance. Shortfalls in governance are quite significant and play a large role in deterring progress globally. This is largely due to high and rising governance challenges in South and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Arab region. Shares of the three challenges are more evenly distributed for sub-Saharan Africa, but from 2000-2010, the quality of human development was more pressing. In North America, lagging achievement on environmental sustainability is the most notable challenge.

The DCI captures progress in reducing development challenges over the past two decades, with the index falling globally from 0.485 to 0.437. The same pattern has held across most regions. East Asia and the Pacific achieved the highest rate of decline. Since 2010, however, Latin America and the Caribbean and North America have scored higher on the DCI. This is a significant finding as it indicates that development progress, when measured from a broader lens, does not always move in one direction.

Although DCI results are statistically close to other global development indices such as the HDI, SDG Index (SDGI) and Social Progress Index (SPI), discrepancies in results for some countries can be strikingly large.