HUMAN RESOURCES

HUMAN RESOURCES 

Human resources play a dual role in the process of economic development they are both the end to which the effort is directed and the means by which it is carried out. The emphasis in the present context will tend to be on the worker rather than the consumer. This reflects the fact that development itself has a time dimension, being concerned so greatly with the. creation of facilities and conditions that will contribute to a stream of income in the future.

At the root of the human resource problem lies the demographic question of numbers. Control over disease vectors has brought about an extremely rapid decline in death rates and because birth rates have not changed much, the developing countries are in the mildest of an unprecedented upsurge in 9opulation. In the first half of the 1960's birth rates and death rates and rates of natural increase all averaged about twice as much in the developing countries as in the more advanced countries, and the annual increment in. the population of the developing countries rose from 15 million in 1930-1950 to 28 million in 1950-1960 and 37 million in 1960-1965-24 million in Asia (other than mainland China) and the rest more or less equally divided between Africa and Latin America. This expansion and the. associated juvenescence--of the population has added considerably to the task of at least maintaining per capita levels of consumption and training necessary to sustain, and if possible raise, average productivity.

As successive censuses and demographic surveys have brought home the arithmetic facts, more and more Governments have. taken active steps to bring fertility into a more tolerable balance with the new mortality experience. The techniques for accomplishing this have improved very greatly in recent years, but the physical problem of making them available and the psycho-social problem of making them acceptable pose a new challenge to most countries. As Governments have no direct means of bringing about family planning, it is all the more necessary for official instrumentalities to be deployed consistently in support of population controls: minimum constraint on the production and importation of the required medical and para-medical personnel along with appropriate wage scales to attract them to the rural areas where the need tends to be greatest. Some countries have found it helpful to offer some financial incentives for participation in the family-planning program.

Productivity can be maintained only if employment opportunities are adequate. This is partly a question, of 'the education and training of workers in line with the pattern of demand and partly a question of the supply of complementary factors of production. The former imposes a harsh choice on many developing countries: education as an end, raising the quality of life, may have to be postponed in favor of training as 'a means of operating the more complex economy emerging from the development process. The latter also involves hard choices, implicit in the need to extend the division of labor and diversify the economy in many ways the three major productive sectors agriculture, industry, and infrastructure-compete for the available manpower resources, not only among themselves but also with commerce and public administration. 

Recent experience in a number of developing 'countries has shown that strong preferences for the traditional professions and for so-called white-collar work, in general, can exercise quite a distorting influence on the structure of education and hence on the output of the schools. In general, it is skilled in the science-based subjects, in engineering and in the practical tasks of a mechanizing economy that tend to be in shortest supply.

Even when a developing country has reconciled itself to the view of education as a development tool, the problems of providing it in an optimal way remain formidable. Where there is a strong desire for literacy, it cannot be summarily brushed aside; but priority may well be given to the areas in which literacy is likely to contribute most to productivity-farmers who are the subject of a cultivation-improvement campaign, for example, or factory workers who may have to follow written instructions. 

The task of making the profile of the educational structure-primary, secondary, higher and vocational, as well as the curriculum followed at each stage, conform as closely as possible to the projected needs of the economy is a continuing challenge. So is the task of providing appropriate inputs in the form of properly located and equipped facilities and well-trained teachers. This is another field in which the setting of an over-all money target--the expenditure of a given proportion of the gross national product, for example, may not achieve its purpose unless it is accompanied by a well-considered determination of the direction and composition of the requisite effort.