- 57 - Chapter 5 CAUSALITY ANALYSIS OF THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX, INNOVATION AND GROWTH 1 Murat AYKIRI 2 Ömer Uğur BULUT 3 INTRODUCTION Human development has been brought to the agenda within the scope of de- velopment economics in the early 1990s, when the Second World War ended and the efects of the Cold War began to diminish partially, in order to increase the welfare levels of the colonized countries when their under-developed and his- torical backgrounds were considered. Within the framework of development economics, it was noticed that economic development is not sufcient to ensure human development and the adoption of a more comprehensive and coordinated development notion is needed in this regard; hence the “human development” approach started to be included in debates over economic development. Te hu- man development approach is a notion that states that the ultimate aim in the understanding of development should focus more on people than economic size and that all economic activities should be designed for the purpose of improving human capacity (Gürses, 2009, p.304). With the embracement of this approach, put forward within the framework of human development, by broad circles in the early 1990s, states started to focus more on human development in order to gain the transformation and develop- ment they desire in social, economic and political domains. According to UNDP’s 2018 report, for example, global population increased from 5 billion to 7.5 billion people and the population with low human development has been declined from 3 billion to 926 million, in other words from the 60% to 12% of the global popula- tion, between 1990 and 2017. By the same token, the number of people with high and very high human development has tripled from 1.2 billion to 3.8 billion, in other words from 24% to 51% of the global population in the same period. Tese 1 This study was presented as an extendend abstract at the “IV. International Caucasus Central Asia Foreign Trade & Logistics Congress” 2 Asst. Prof. Kafkas University, maykiri36@gmail.com 3 Asst. Prof. Kafkas University, bulut.o.u@gmail.com