Mahbub ul Haq

He was born into a Punjabi Muslim family at Gurdaspur, Punjab, on 24 February 1934 — Wikidata and the Arabic article, which follows the German text, give 22 February, and the Arabic article names Jammu instead; the English biography's date and place are the ones carried here. His teenage years were marked by the violence of Partition; the family narrowly escaped killing on a refugee train and reached Lahore, where he took his economics degree at Government College University in 1953. A scholarship took him to Cambridge for a second degree, then to Yale for his PhD, with postdoctoral work at Harvard in 1960–61; at Cambridge he formed a close friendship with Amartya Sen. ^{1 2 3}

Returning to Pakistan in 1957, he joined the Planning Commission and rose to chief economist through the 1960s, at first championing the free-market growth strategy of the Ayub Khan era. In an April 1968 speech at Karachi he alleged that 22 industrial family groups controlled about two-thirds of Pakistan's industrial assets and most of its banking and insurance — a revelation that helped mobilise the movement that brought Ayub Khan down. From 1970 to 1982 he served at the World Bank as Robert McNamara's director of policy planning, steering the Bank toward poverty alleviation and basic needs. Back in Pakistan he directed the Planning Commission, became minister of planning and development in 1983 and finance minister in 1985, pursuing tax reform, deregulation and social spending before being forced to resign in January 1986; he returned as caretaker finance minister in 1988. In 1989 he joined the UNDP in New York, where he led the team — including Amartya Sen, Paul Streeten, Inge Kaul, Frances Stewart and Richard Jolly — that produced the first Human Development Report in 1990. In 1996 he founded the Human Development Centre at Islamabad, renamed for him after his death. ¹

He died at New York City on 16 July 1998, aged 64. The Economist called him one of the visionaries of international development, and Amartya Sen and Tam Dalyell judged that his work brought about a major change in the understanding and statistical accounting of development. The UNDP's Mahbub ul Haq Award for Outstanding Contribution to Human Development, established in his honour, has been given to figures including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Fazle Hasan Abed, Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Gro Harlem Brundtland. ^{1 2}

His faith is recorded as unknown, and the case is flagged. The single religious datum in the sources is his family's: the English article says he was born into a Punjabi Muslim family. Family background is not a personal attestation, no text names any school or affiliation of his own, and Wikidata records only Islam in general terms. ^{1 3}

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