Disparities among countries in their capacity to create and use technology for development has persisted for a long time and are now huge. It is likely to become an increasingly significant factor in determining patterns of global development and poverty in the 21st century. The last decade’s technological transformations and the emergence of the global marketplace have raised the stakes for all countries to be technologically connected – to be able to create, adapt and use global technological innovations. All countries face the challenges of participating and competing in the technology-based global marketplace and ensuring that technology is harnessed as a tool for human development. Yet the nature of those challenges is very different across countries, because countries vary hugely in their technological capacity and needs. This paper presents a measurement approach to assessing the technological achievements of a country as an aid to policy makers in identifying policy priorities. It develops a Technology Achievement Index (TAI), a composite measure of technological progress that ranks countries on a comparative global scale.

great deal of nonsense has been written and said about ization in recent years. Some has come from political right, JL jl some from political left, some from business and political leaders, some from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and people in streets. The term globalization has become so slippery, so am biguous, so subject to misunderstanding and political manipulation that it should be banned from further use, at least until there is precise agree ment as to its meaning. In particular, those involved in economic and political policymaking and debate must clarify their meaning and their messages in this sphere if they are to be taken seriously. The term globalization confuses two discrete phenomena. The first is shrinkage in space and in time that world has experienced in consequence of technological revolutions in transport, communica tions, and information processing. Although these developments have not affected all countries or people uniformly, world has for many become a much smaller place. References to our global village or spaceship Earth or, more prosaically, the economy capture reality that actions and decisions in one part of world have greater impact on other parts of humanity and do so with greater speed than was experienced in years past. The behavior of world's inter related twenty-four-hours-a-day financial markets typifies this trend. This new globalization has bred more detailed and up-to-date knowl edge of people's activities. But income and wealth imbalance have also created totally unbalanced information flows and what C. R Snow has described as ultimate obscenity: rich sitting in comfort of their living rooms watching other people starve on color television. This new technology-driven globalization is new reality to which we all

In a recent article (Bardhan and Klasen, 1999) we had reviewed UNDP’s gender-related indices included in the annual Human Development Reports since 1995. In particular, we had suggested certain modifications to the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI), including a revision of the earned income component of the GDI. Partly based on our comments, UNDP modified the procedure for calculating the GDI in the 1999 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1999). Since the 1999 Report presents the new procedure in the technical annex without mentioning that it is different from previous years’ procedure, we want to briefly describe the changes made and their effects on the GDI ranking of countries.

(2000). A Decade of Human Development. Journal of Human Development: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 17-23.