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Are we better off today than five years ago?

Abdullah Shibli
DURING the election campaign in 1980 in the USA, candidate Ronald Reagan asked his countrymen rhetorically: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" and the rest is history. Americans took the question very seriously and concluded that they were worse off in 1980 than in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter started his term, and voted him out of office.
Imagine what would happen if our politicians asked Bangladeshi voters the same question, or a similar one, every five years as they head for the national elections, and the outcomes in the national elections were based on the electorate's perception of their well-being, or quality of life? Unfortunately, it is not easy to answer the question, "Are you better off today than you were when the opposition was in power?", since improvement in the quality of life is not a matter of simply building more roads, better pay, or even fewer people living in poverty. It is more than these, or even the sum of these or other measures of welfare.
Let me elaborate on the last statement. Quality of Life, like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Per Capita Income (PCI) is one of the few measures of a country's well-being and economic progress recognised around the globe. Unlike the other two metrics, a Quality of Life Index (QLI) allows the major donors and international agencies to measure a country's progress in improving its citizens living conditions in both monetary and real terms over a time period, and in comparison with other countries. The goal of this short essay is to identify a couple of areas where Bangladesh could do better on the global race to score higher on the quality of life measures and to improve the lot of the average Bangladeshis.
Let me start off with some well-known facts. My fellow Bangladeshis will be glad to know that Bangladesh compares well in comparison with other South Asian countries and it has done well in the last three decades to improve the quality of life of its population. As the following table shows, it is at par
with Pakistan, and India, all things being equal.
Economist's Quality of Life Index for South Asian countries
So, what is QLI? In simple terms, it is basically a composite, or an index, of several measures that capture both subjective and objective conditions in a country. Per capita income is one of the nine indicators used by The Economist magazine to calculate its Quality-of Life Index (QLI), whereas political freedom is one of the subjective indicators in the index. Other measures such as UNDP's Human Development Index or the Life Quality Index developed by Canada's Waterloo University take a subset of the nine indicators used by The Economist. However, QLI has its critics, since it includes certain indicators measured arbitrarily, to say the least: geography, religious freedom, and political rights. On the other hand, the indices ignore other more relevant statistics, for example unemployment rate and malnutrition.
As a Bangladeshi voting citizen, I would also value the accomplishments of a government to lower the crime rate, public corruption, and hon-esty/truthfulness of the politicians. Among the economic indicators I would consider the movement in percentage of the population below the poverty line, the hunger rate among children, and some other health indicators (deaths by cholera, drinking water, elimination of diarrhea, etc.) which are not factored into QLI.
Having said that, the overall QLI has been improving since 1988 and it has improved relative to others. However, there is a statistical margin of error. And the most important caveat is, "did the QLI improve because of policies of the present government?" Many of the improvements in our quality of life happened due to industrialisation, availability of rural credit, and lower birth rate, and these are long-term
developments. Improvement in the law and order situation, if any, could be claimed by the current government.
Incidentally, the National Public Perception Study jointly sponsored by Asia Foundation and The Daily Star asks the respondents on the performance of the present government. In the area of education and health the policies were rated better than in the economic indicators: unemployment, inflation, and corruption. It would be unscientific to conclude from this fragmentary evidence that the quality of life has worsened or improved during the present regime, but the electorate appear to have made up their mind. It needs to be seen if the surveys, the elections, and the quality of life measurements dreamed up by academics all agree or are at odds with each other.
I will end this essay by turning to two curious aspects of The Economist's Quality of Life Index. Bangladesh will score higher than some of our Asean sister countries and less than others in three areas: political stability, political freedom, and climate. Fortunately, unlike some of our neighbours, we are working on political stability and political freedom. But progress has been uneven in the last twenty years. Unfortunately, we can't do much about climate!
On a positive but bizarre use of the index, The Economist has recently been touting QLI as an indicator of future well-being, and calling it the "lottery of life" index. It purportedly answers the question, "where do you want to be born," i.e. which country offers children born in 2013 the best outlook for them when they reach adulthood in 2030? Well, for all it is worth, and for Bangladeshi's who are trying to emigrate, they should either head for the small Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden or Denmark) or Switzerland. Unfortunately, language barrier and strict immigration laws make these countries almost off-limits. However, Australia was one of the three countries that topped the latest QLI survey, and Australia has pretty liberal immigration policies.
The writer lives and works in Boston.