A Pakistani economist. Mahbub was particularly concerned with the countries of South Asia. It was 'tragically comic' that India and Pakistan, after 'bleeding their economies' to pay for arms, 'beg and submit to all sorts of conditionalities from international lending institutions'. Haq was not sure whether South Asia had the political will to cut their arms bills and finance their 'essential human goals'. Mahbub was the originator of the idea of human development, and the architect of the United Nations Development programme's Human Development Report, which he helped launch in 1990 and published each year since. He spent a long time at the World Bank and had a world audience. Mahbub wrote The Strategy of Economics Planning (1963) and The Poverty Curtain (1974). Mahbub was born in Jummu, Kashmir and went through the 'western citadels of learning', Cambridge, Yale and Harvard in 1950s and became accepted as one of the visionaries of international developments. He died of pneumonia in New York.