Human Development Report 2006

This year's human development report, Beyond Scarcity: Power, politics and the global water crisis, focuses on the fact

that we are in the midst of a crisis in water and sanitation that overwhelmingly affects the poor. ‘Crisis’ means here that too many people do not have access to enough water under the right conditions to live. This crisis, the HDR suggests, is not about scarcity – the world is ultimately not running out of water. People do not have water because they are locked out by poverty, inequality and government failure.

This reminds me of Amartya Sen's argument that famines are not caused by a lack of food, rather by a lack of access to food - due to economic and social factors (like a rise in the price of food, job losses, distribution problems etc). The HDR 2006, for example, points out that the poor pay far more for water than we do...

in the slums of Nairobi the poor pay five to 10 times more per litre of water than wealthy people living in the same city. The poorest households of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Jamaica spend on average over 10 percent of their income on water; in the United Kingdom, by contrast, spending more than three percent of family income on water is considered an economic hardship.

The report says that effective water delivery in countries has been stagnated by the debate on public-versus-private delivery...

The debate over the relative merits of public and private-sector performance has been a distraction from the inadequate performance of both public and private water providers in overcoming the global water deficit,” says the Report. A new, more strategic approach that puts the poor at the centre of the solution is essential to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, stress the authors.

Appreciate your life - the HDR also reports annually on 'quality of life' among countries (based on the HDI indicator) - this year Norway's # 1, followed by Iceland and Australia. See rankings.