Mahbub ul Haq (February 22, 1934 - July 16, 1998), born in Jammu, Kashmir, was an influential and world renowned Pakistani economist. He was one of the founders of Human Development Theory.Together with Amartya Sen, a personal friend, whom he met while studying at Cambridge, he created the Human Development Index, which has become one of the most influential and widely used indices to measure human development across countries. The HDI has been used since 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme for its annual report. (Human Development Report - http://hdr.undp.org).
Education
Haq attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained a degree in Economics.
Professional Career
Haq also served as the World Bank's director of policy planning (1970-1982) and headed Pakistan's Finance Ministry as its minister of finance and planning (1982-1988). During his tenure at the World Bank (1970-82), Dr. Haq is credited with making a major contribution to the Bank’s development philosophy and lending policies, steering more attention towards poverty alleviation programmes and increased allocations for small farm production, nutrition, education, water supply and other social sectors. Drawing on this reform process, Dr. Haq wrote The Poverty Curtain (1976), a seminal study that served as a precursor to the basic needs and human development approaches of the 1980s. Along with his talented team, Dr. Haq did much to transform the World Bank into a development institution that places people, instead of rigid economic indicators, at centre-stage.
Serving as Pakistan’s Minister of Finance, Planning and Commerce (1982-88), Dr. Haq is credited with significant tax reforms, deregulation of the economy, increased emphasis on human development and several initiatives for poverty alleviation. ‘Under Mahbub’s direction, the Planning Commission became once again a lively place and began to exert powerful influence on social sector issues, including education and family planning, much neglected in earlier Zia years––as Finance Minister, Mahbub piloted a major acceleration in social spending’, reflects Parvez Hasan. (Paragraph quoted from [1])
In 1996, Haq founded the Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre in Islamabad,[Pakistan]]- a policy research institute committed to organizing professional research, policy studies and seminars in the area of human development, with a special focus on the South Asia region.
Death
Dr. Haq passed away on July 16, 1998 in New York, leaving behind his wife and two children. ‘Mahbub ul Haq’s untimely death is a loss to the world ...’, wrote Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General. The president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn wrote in a letter to Mrs. Haq, ‘... probably more than anyone else, (Mahbub) provided the intellectual impetus for the Bank’s commitment to poverty reduction in the early 1970’s.’ ‘His unique contributions were trend setters for the world and focused attention on the South Asian social realities, urging all of us to look at the dark corners of our social milieus’, former Indian Prime Minister I.K. Gujral noted. Who was Dr. Mahbub ul Haq––this exceptional person who made a difference for people?
Selected works
- The Strategy of Economic Planning (1963)
- The Poverty Curtain (1976)
- Reflections on Human Development (1995)
- The UN And The Bretton Woods Institutions : New Challenges For The Twenty-First Century / Edited By Mahbub Ul Haq ... [Et Al.] (1995)
- The Vision and the Reality (1995)
- The Third World and the international economic order (1976)
- New Imperatives of Human Security (1995)
- A New Framework for Development Cooperation (1995)
- The Myth of the Friendly Markets (1992)
- Humanizing Global Institutions (1998)
External links
- Dr. Mahbub-ul-Haq page on United Nations in Pakistan site - Contains a tribute, his speeches and the Human Development Review Journal
- The Mahbub-ul-Haq Development Center
- [2] - A Tribute to Dr. Haq's page on the UN's website