GNP per head of between US $ 696 and US $ 8,625.) As a result, although the region contains more than half of the world's population, it accounts for only one -quarter of the world income in terms of GNP... Asia and the Pacific...contain a disproportionate share of the world's poor, where the poor are defined as those whose local purchasing power is equivalent to less than US $1 a day." 6 The percent of the population below poverty line and the number of poor people in Asia are given in the following table.7
2.0. Human Resources
2.1. "It is well recognized that gross national product (GNP) when converted at official exchange rates (OERs) may be a poor measure of relative living standards. Official exchange rates may not be a good reflection of the relative worth of goods and services produced, since only part of the production is traded internationally. The inadequacy of GNP as measured at OERs has been recognized by the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since the first report in 1990 and more recently highlighted by the IMF in its World Economic Outlook in 1993 and 1994...However, not only has the UNDP recognized the inadequacy of comparing countries' incomes using OERs, but it has also shown the relative levels of GNP may be weakly linked to differences in life expectancies, literacy rates, and other social indicators. For most countries in Asia and the Pacific, the GNP per capita rankings understate their relative living standards.8 The following table shows the GNP and HDI
6 Chris Edwards,"Current Economic Trends in Asia and the Pacific," The Far East and Australasia, p.33.
7 Ibid.
8 Edwards, p.34.
