Author(s)

Santosh Mehrotra¹, Sarthi Acharya^2*

¹Jawahar Lal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
²Institute of Human Development, New Delhi, India.

The Human Development paradigm states that for workers to create value and enjoy the fruits of their labour, they have to be adequately accomplished through better education, skills, adequate nutrition and health, among other factors. It makes a case for investing in people as a precondition for progress. Recent literature on development also notes that economic growth cannot be sustained without people’s inclusion. The essence of a dynamic HD framework, therefore, is that human capital, inclusion and measures to improve people’s empowerment are paramount. Much of Asia was/is labour surplus; hence, making optimal use of the labour in the growth process until the time when labour from the low productivity sectors (read: agrarian sectors) is redeployed elsewhere would be most desirable. This follows from the standard economic theories and is not new. However, the process does not automatically happen; it has to be planned and carefully executed. This paper puts forth a case for HD-based planning: a process where human capital and the economic sectors are brought into an integrated framework. In practical terms, this implies that three factors are addressed to achieve HD: agrarian reforms, industrial policy and human capital. The paper attempts to assess how select Asian countries have progressed on these counts in the recent past. It identifies the raison d’être of the high achievers’ success and the low achievers’ lack of it in the (implicit or explicit) planning process. Finally, it presents a simple model of how an HD-planning framework might look like.

Human Development, Planning, Agrarian Reforms, Industrial Policy, Human Capital

Mehrotra, S. and Acharya, S. (2017) Planning for Human Development—Experiences in Asia. Theoretical Economics Letters, 7, 1607-1631. doi: 10.4236/tel.2017.76109.