Human Development in the Era of Globalization: An Asian Perspective

“People are the real wealth of any nation and every development strategy must be focused on enhancing their capabilities, achievements and freedoms” (UNDP, 2010). In the era of 1950’s, GDP per capita was generally used to measure human development in any nation but in late 1970’s and early 1980’s, it was recognized that only economic indicators are unable to measure the multidimensionality of human development. In this direction, UNDP introduced human development index (HDI) in 1990. In this report, it was considered that economic indicators cannot fully capture the essence of human development because human choices are infinite and change over time but three essential are required for everyone to lead healthy and long life, knowledge/awareness in terms of education and decent standard of living. If these basic requirements (education, health and decent standard of living) are not fulfilled then many other opportunities remain inaccessible to the masses. It is generally considered that human development is the most important aspect for the prosperity and sustained growth of any country. So this is appropriate time to empirically analyze the impact of globalization policies on human development. Many of the developed, developing and least developed nations have considerably opened up their economies for external sector liberalization in terms of trade liberalization, foreign private investment and financial sector reforms. As many of the Asian countries gone through the agenda of economic and financial liberalization and this is appropriate time to investigate the impact of this process of globalization on human development. After collection of data, instrumental variable technique has been applied for empirical investigation and found that trade openness is one of the best instrument used for human development in Asian perspective. ICT access is another criterion which can be used because in changing scenario of 21st century it is required here that for access to health and education facilities, everyone should have access to ICT for cheaper, easy and convenient access. Workers’ remittances and FDI are significantly and negatively contributing. The main reason behind this is the inflow of remittances is spent on those activities which are not human development oriented. Here is a need to give awareness to migrants’ families regarding importance of human development for their households, as well as for sustainable economic growth. As for as FDI is concerned, it is significant and negative in all models which is alarming situation for Asian countries and policy makers should focus on the direction of FDI, its impact and how Asian countries can use FDI for human well being. Almost all investors wish to invest in those sectors where they earn maximum profit and when there exists institutional issues then focus diverted from human well being to non issue. So policy makers should convince foreign investors to invest on profit oriented projects along with human well being perspective. For indepth analysis of globalization on human development, this study estimate some models by introducing control variables along with globalization model. This study utilized control variables from financial, fiscal, and socio-economic sector and found that in presence of control variables the direction and intensity of globalization indicators remain same in human development. So the overall findings are very consistent in almost all models and become helpful for policy design in Asian perspective. At the end of estimations, some diagnostics (DWH test, F statistics and P-H test) have been applied and almost all models are suitable in methodological perspectives. On the basis of findings of this study, it requires to rethink on the economic issue of globalization from interdisciplinary perspectives, regarding its evolutions and new solutions. These are the latest research findings of this research and hopefully will attract academicians and professionals from various business and economics disciplines to tackle this issue and also brainstorm for new ideas. On the basis of empirical analysis of this study, some policy implications have been highlighted as; trade openness has the direct and significant impact on human development and all countries should focus on minimizing trade barriers to become more globalized for the promotion of human development. ICT access is important variable because this leads toward easy access to social services and other indicators of human development. ICT access is also beneficial for implementation and evaluation purpose, especially in developing areas. The direction of FDI is alarming and not contributing in human well being. Policy makers should focus on human development oriented FDI by enhancing argument power with foreign investors. Workers’ remittances are not productively used because recipient families are mostly uneducated/unskilled and government should announce some policies to ensure that remittances are spent in activities those are relevant to human development.