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October 10, 2000 The
Editor Dear Madam: Re: UNDP Human Development Report 2000 Your edition Monday, October 10 carried on the front page a lead article reporting on the farewell presentation made by Bishop Neville DeSouza as he demitted office as Lord Bishop of Jamaica. The Lord Bishop quoted the recent UNDP report which asserted that in Jamaica the top 20% of the population accounted for 80% of national income whilst the lowest 20% shared 1. 9%. Again, based on the data published by the UNDP, Bishop DeSouza argued that the only country below Jamaica in terms of inequitable income distribution was "war-torn Sierra Leone" where the lowest 20% shared 1.1% of national income. Whilst income in Jamaica is indeed inequitably distributed, the fact is that the data published by the UNDP on Jamaica are erroneous. Shortly after the publication of the document I wrote to Mrs. Gillian Lindsay-Nanton, the UNDP Resident Representative in Jamaica, pointing out that the data presented for Jamaica were incorrect. Mrs Lindsay-Nanton, in response, informed me that the local UNDP office had requested from the Human Development Report Office in New York an explanation of the data and it had been "acknowledged that the report inadvertedly published in accurate figures. Mrs. Lindsay-Nanton concluded that "the UNDP office in Jamaica regrets any confusion and misunderstanding that this statistical error might have caused." For the benefit of your readers please find attached the errata page which is now available on the on-line version of the report at (http://www.undp.org/hdr2000/home.shtmll). The correct comparable figures to those quoted by Bishop DeSouza are that the bottom 20% of the population accounts for 7% of national income and the richest 20% for 49.9%. As I said at the beginning, this distribution is still unacceptable but is significantly different from the erroneous figures originally published by the UNDP. Yours sincerely,
Omar Davies, MP
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