The 2020s have brought a degree of chaos not seen in decades. A pandemic was followed by a full-scale war in Europe; both sent food and fuel prices surging. Extreme weather events have shown that climate change is beginning to bite. The phrase “unprecedented times” soon sounded worn and vacuous.

This all took a toll on global standards of living. One measure of this, the un’s Human Development Index (hdi), fell in 2020 for the first time since its launch in 1990. It fell again in 2021. The hdi is one of the most widely used measures of countries’ development, after gdp. It gauges progress in terms of societal outcomes, including life expectancy at birth, expected and average years of schooling and gross national income per person. The latest figures, released on March 13th, show that the global hdi is rising again, but progress has been slow and uneven. Our table below shows how the 194 countries tracked by the UN compare.

Switzerland topped the charts for a second consecutive year. Its overall score is boosted by high incomes and long life expectancies. Other countries in western Europe have some of the highest scores. Some parts of Asia also do well, with Hong Kong and Singapore making it to the top ten. Elsewhere it is bleaker: countries such as Peru, Colombia, Libya and Lebanon have made little progress since 2019. Living standards in Ukraine and Russia have also dropped: the countries fell by 23 and four places respectively between 2021 and 2022. War-torn Yemen, poor and indebted Belize, and Micronesia, an island country at risk of being swallowed by rising sea levels, all peaked in 2010 and have declined every year since.

The index is a useful, but incomplete, measure. It does not account for economic inequality, for example, or disparities between ethnicities and genders. (The un now produces separate indices that include some of these measures.)

But it does provide a consistent measure for policymakers and ngos. Its regional projections for 2023 show that living standards are set to rise further still; only the Arab world will not have fully rebounded to its score in 2019. Nevertheless the long-term trend appears to have suffered a permanent setback since the pandemic (see chart 1). The value for 2022 and projection for 2023 suggests that development may be stuck on a course below the pre-2019 trend, which had held strong since 1999.

This setback will affect the world’s poorest the hardest. Across the oecd, a club of rich countries, hdi values have recovered to or surpassed pre-pandemic levels. But that is true for less than half of the world’s least-developed countries. For 20 years the gap between countries with the highest and lowest hdi values had narrowed (except for a brief period around the financial crash of 2007-09). But since 2020 it has widened.

Yet there are reasons for hope. The chaos of the 2020s has also shown that governments can collaborate on some big issues. During the pandemic, vaccines were developed, produced and distributed at remarkable speed, saving an estimated 20m lives in their first year alone. At cop28 last year the world proved that it could agree on a deal to tackle climate change (even if fulfilling it is another matter). More of that will be needed to overcome the setbacks from the start of the decade.■