Are Human Rights a Luxury or a Normal Good?

One of the most controversial and thorny issues in international politics is the issue of human rights violations. Governments are criticized for consistently and willingly violating human rights. This approach assumes that governments have the option to violate or respect human rights. However, many governments may face a different dilemma, namely the eradication of poverty or a war that threatens their existence as a nation. Thus, governments should not be judged solely on their human rights record but also on their performance in reducing the number of their citizens who live below the poverty threshold. As rightly pointed out by the UNDP (2023), “poverty is a denial of human rights”. All other indicators may be considered as luxury goods that will be pursued only when a country reaches a certain level of economic development (income per capita). The aim of this paper is to investigate the association between human rights indicators and per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and to examine whether human rights, deemed a commodity, can be considered a luxury good, a normal good, or a necessity. It is found in this paper that the income elasticity of human rights is positive but less than one and at very high levels of income, close to zero, indicating that the commodity human rights is a necessity. Based on this evidence, countries are classified according to whether, given their per capita income, their human rights record aligns with expectations. The evidence identifies overperforming and underperforming countries. Keywords: human rights, per capita GDP, luxury goods, normal goods, United Nations, statistical analysis, income elasticity, politics