A human development index for marriage

The divorce debate is filled with assumptions about what divorce would mean for the self-development of the adults and children involved. It is time we had a way of weighing these assumptions.

Pro-divorce campaigners speak about how the right to remarry would help already legally separated couples tidy up their existing informal arrangements, and offer the prospect of a fresh start to others.

Anti-divorce campaigners, like the Cana Movement through its widely distributed newsletter, argue that the right to remarry is often a false promise: in practice, divorce is statistically correlated with higher rates of poverty, and lower rates of well-being and educational attainment for children. (It is not the right to remarry that is associated with these consequences, but marital separation; but the right to remarry does raise the number of separations.)

These negative results are not everywhere the same. Sometimes, the variation may surprise. Someone inveighing against "liberal culture", for example, will need to explain why more liberal Holland and Denmark have lower divorce rates than the UK; and why, in the US, the socially conservative South has higher rates than the liberal East Coast.

Since divorce involves the splitting of family assets, it is correlated to greater economic difficulties for families. But these also depend on the state's educational policy and welfare provision.

The UK and the US, for example, are very unequal societies. The quality of the children's state school often depends on the family home being in the right neighbourhood. A divorce that requires the selling of the family home, and moving out of the neighbourhood, may well affect the quality of education that the children will receive at their new school (apart from the other urban services and security offered in the new neighbourhood).

Such an effect is less often seen in more egalitarian societies like those of Scandinavia. Since, because of Malta's small size, moving home does not necessarily entail changing state school, on this important point Malta may well resemble Scandinavia more than the UK.

The salience of such differences is missed by the Cana Movement. Its newsletter draws on studies of the US and UK, but speaks of the impact of divorce without speaking of a specific institutional context. In Scandinavia, the levels of poverty associated with single (including divorced) motherhood are markedly lower.

Can we have a more precise idea where Malta stands? I believe we can. The Human Development Index (HDI) was devised by development economists in the 1990s to measure welfare in a way that went beyond the indications given by GDP per capita alone. It includes two other indices: life expectancy and an educational attainment index (literacy rate and educational enrolment rate).

Its purpose is to measure social inclusivity and the chances of developing one's potential. Its original aim had nothing to do with divorce: it was meant to compare economic development and to unearth pockets of deprivation within affluent societies. It has rightly been criticised for not measuring human development in its full complexity. It has not, to my knowledge, been used to compare divorcees with single and married people.

However, for the purposes of Malta's divorce debate, it would be useful to compare the HDI of separated couples and their children with those of married couples and their children. If marital separation is associated, statistically, with greater rates of illness, poverty and educational failure or underachievement, the HDI would show it up. It might also show that there is less to be concerned about than we might think.

Two other indices should be added to the HDI. One would test for gender on all three HDI indices. The other would test for access to means of communication: in an age where people probably spend as much on cable TV, telephony and broadband access as they do on transport, a measure of social inclusivity needs such an index.

Calculating such an HDI should not be difficult. A lot of the necessary data is readily available. Asking for an HDI cannot be accused of trying to defer action.

On the contrary, it would be neutral on whether divorce should be introduced. Anti-divorce campaigners might use it to push a message of stunted human development and spiralling costs, although they might also find the actual HDI will make such stark scenarios seem implausible.

But pro-divorce campaigners can use the HDI to reassure voters that they know what needs to be done by the state to mitigate some of the negative consequences of a divorce law, so as to join the right to remarry to real prospects of rebuilding one's life.

An HDI would greatly raise the standard of the debate on divorce - not just on whether we should introduce it, but on what provisions the law should make if introduced. It would raise the standard not because it would give us the answers but because it would pose all sides with questions that so far have been largely evaded.

ranierfsadni@europe.com