This is a brave and ambitious book that raises and responds to important methodological and practical concerns with respect to the measurement and realization of second-generation rights. Despite the Vienna Declaration’s statement that “all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated” and must be addressed “in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis” (Article 5), social and economic rights have long played second fiddle to civil and political rights, with their fulfillment seen by many as desirable or negotiable rather than essential. The language of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) has arguably facilitated this obfuscation by referencing state obligations to “take steps . . . to the maximum of its available resources” toward “achieving progressively” ESC rights (Article 2), offering states the defense of insufficient capacity. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Terra Lawson-Remer, and Susan Randolph engage with the language of the ICESCR directly by developing a metric of comparison that provides an alternative answer to the question of how the progress of countries and peoples should be judged (p. 7).

While the authors are not the first to attempt to measure socioeconomic rights (see for example, David L. Cingranelli and David L. Richards, “Measuring Government Effort to Respect Economic and Social Human Rights: A Peer Benchmark,” in Shareen Hertel and Lane Minkler eds., Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement and Policy Issues, 2007; Todd Landman and Edzia Carvalho, Measuring Human Rights, 2010), they offer a unique contribution through the development of a measure that incorporates both achievement and state capacity, thereby quantifying and comparing “progressive realization” and “maximum available resources.” Arguing that as “[c]ountries of the world face hugely different levels of deprivation and capacity” (p. 11), and that, consequently, the “level of obligation is relative” (p. 10), the authors develop a framework termed the Socio Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF) Index that measures progress against state-specific Achievement Possibilities Frontiers (APF). Unlike most metrics of comparison that rank states on an absolute scale, the APF demarcates what a state could “feasibly achieve given the resources available, based on historical data” (p. 15), measuring individual state performance in relation to this relative frontier. APF capacity is based primarily on GDP, but the analysis includes some consideration of contributions by international assistance, endogeneity of GDP, and poor economic planning (e.g., Zimbabwe). It does not engage with less state-oriented movements of labor and capital, such as migrant workers, remittances, and off-shoring.

In contrast with approaches based on violations, the book focuses on measuring fulfillment, a task others have dismissed as “unfeasible” (Chapman 1996, as cited on p. 37). The authors focus on six rights (food, education, health, housing, decent work, social security), aggregating components of each right to build individual indices, and subsequently aggregating the six to form a composite index (p. 42). They are thoughtful and transparent as to what sources and indicators they use for each right, including careful consideration of different contexts (i.e., appropriate measures of education in wealthy countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) versus LDCs). Although they provide selected country examples of disaggregation by subgroup (Brazil, the United States, India), and note that the index “potentially can be disaggregated across subgroups in the population” (p. 69), the index’s biggest pitfall is its likely use in aggregated form. Like other state-oriented tools, SERF assumes that the most important actors are states (not, for example, corporations), and the most important differences are between, rather than within, states. Striking differences in health outcomes between indigenous and nonindigenous people in OECD countries like Canada and Australia, for example, will be easily elided with aggregated versions of this model. Although it is a dramatic improvement over using GDP as proxy for quality of life, this index, as is typical of aggregated quantitative measures, struggles with the translation of life experiences into comparative numerical measures.

That the index fails to do everything, however, is not a reason to avoid it; rather, it provides incentives to be cautious and thoughtful in its use and to draw on SERF as one of several measurement tools. Fukuda-Parr, Lawson-Remer, and Randolph attempt the impossible in constructing SERF, and do so with uncommon transparency and skill, outlining in Chapters 2 through 4 the complex series of decisions they navigated in piecing together this index. These chapters provide the book’s principle contribution and will be useful practical reading for a wide range of audiences, including graduate methodology students, state governments, and the UN Committee on Economic and Cultural Rights.

Chapter 5 provides the data of the SERF index, showing where states rank in this “apples to apples” comparison, reordering states based on what percentage of their capacity they are delivering. Chapters 6 and 7 engage theoretically, the former drawing on the SERF data to attempt to answer “What matters most for strong performance?” and the latter responding directly to expected critiques. The authors contribute to a series of prominent theoretical debates, examining links between democracy, legal guarantees, growth, gender equity, and SERF outcomes. These findings are largely complex and correlative, with the strongest and most straightforward correlation between gender equality and high SERF scores (pp. 143–47). Analyzing GDP and SERF scores in concert, the authors also examine state movement, finding that states in the “vicious” quadrant of low SERF scores and low GDP growth are far more likely to be “stuck” in this position of low growth/low rights over time than states with high SERF scores and low GDP growth where movement to the “virtuous” (high growth/high rights) quadrant over time is quite likely (pp. 161–62). This finding offers a potentially persuasive economic argument for state investment in socioeconomic rights.

Here, however, a more multifaceted engagement with the full spectrum of rights is needed, as some of the most striking examples of growth and emphasis on socioeconomic rights have been at the expense, neglect, or delayed fulfilment of civil and political rights. While the authors investigate whether states that “perform well on one substantive right to do so at the expense of poor performance on other substantive right” (p. 166), finding that they do not, they perform this regression analysis using only the six rights of the SERF index, leaving unanswered the question of whether first-generation rights are compromised in the pursuit of second-generation rights.

Fukuda-Parr, Lawson-Remer, and Randolph state that they aim to develop “a methodology that takes the obligation of progressive realization to the maximum of available resources seriously” (p. 215). They deliver on this promise, developing a metric to compare state performance that is based on realization (rather than codification or violation), that is centered on citizen enjoyment of these rights, and that concretely takes into consideration state capacity. Their careful research also highlights the need for more complete and consistent state-level data in order to increase the breadth and robustness of SERF and other composite indices. Reflection on the difficult questions they seek to answer in this ambitious book prompts other, perhaps even more challenging questions: How might this index address cultural rights, environmental rights, and collective rights?