by Claire Melamed | Nov 14, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
Sustainable Development: more than just windmills?
A few months ago, the Colombian government created what passed for excitement among international climate and development types, with its proposal for ‘sustainable development goals’. In a paper that is surprisingly short given the talk it’s generated, they proposed a set of goals which, in essence, incorporate the current Millennium Development Goals, but go well beyond them in including a range of possible goals on sustainability and the environment.
At the time, Alex raised a set of important questions here on GD about the what, the who and the how of any future SDGs. And over at CGD, Charles Kenny made a plea for the SDG and the MDG people to start talking to each other to provide some of the substance to underpin these ideas.
And since then? Global negotiations are funny things. In the absence of almost any of the substance that Charles was asking for, and without answers to any of the questions posed by Alex, the SDGs have continued their onward march. Representatives of thirty countries recently met in Bogata to agree some objectives for SDGs, based around reconciling poverty reduction and sustainability.
The SDG train has clearly left the station – even though no one really knows what they are. This is a little disheartening for innocent folk like me who like to believe that facts matter (yeah, I know, hopelessly outdated – I may as well be writing this on a Smith-Corona).
Given that no one really knows what SDGs are, but they sound good and people seem to like them, what might they actually be? Where is the meeting ground between environment and development that could form the basis of a set of goals, and what difference would it make to go about things this way?
Putting sustainability into poverty reduction:
If the MDG project has been about putting forward a set of positive things that need to happen for poor people: more money, more health, more education, what are the sustainability goals that could fit into this sort of framework? The things we need more of, from a sustainability and a development point of view, are, among others, more clean energy, more sustainable sources of water, and more food grown in ways that does not irrevocably deplete natural resources. These are things one could imagine putting into a new set of goals to go alongside the more traditional MDG concerns of health, education and income. Some of them, like water, are even in there already, though almost ignored.
So far so good, but the poverty reduction bit is actually the easy bit. (more…)
by David Steven | Nov 4, 2011 | Economics and development, Global Dashboard
The good news: poverty is in retreat. The bad news: hunger isn’t. That’s the headline finding for the first Millennium Development Goal , which aims to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the proportion of people living in hunger between 1990 and 2015.
Great strides have been made on poverty, as I explained in a recent post, with the proportion of the poor projected to fall to 14.4% of the population of developing countries, from 41.7% in 1990. But what about hunger?
According to the UN’s 2011 assessment of the MDGs, the news is not good. In 1990, 828m people were hungry or 20% of the population of developing countries. Progress has been very slow since then:
The proportion of people in the developing world who went hungry in 2005-2007 remained stable at 16 percent [837m people], despite significant reductions in extreme poverty. Based on this trend, and in light of the economic crisis and rising food prices, it will be difficult to meet the hunger-reduction target in many regions of the developing world.
But hang on a minute. Why is the UN trotting out data for 2005-2007? That’s before the global food crisis, which hit at the same time as the financial crisis and has been just as slow to go away.
Food prices hit rock bottom in 1999, but then rose quickly with vicious increases in 2007 and 2008 (20% and 18%) and 2010 and 2011 (17% and 28%) as illustrated in the chart below. Yet we’re still relying on data from five years ago to estimate hunger.
The UN reported ‘dire’ news of a spike in its 2009 and 2010 MDG reports, with an estimate of more than 1 billion people hungry by 2009. But then it backed off in 2011, simply reporting the old data (which, oddly and without explanation, had been revised up slightly for all years, including 1990).
What gives? The problem is that our data on hunger are extremely patchy and rely on assumptions so heroic that I am left wondering if we are currently able to say anything useful about global hunger at all. (more…)
by Claire Melamed | Nov 2, 2011 | Articles and Publications, Reports
Debate has started in earnest about what should come after the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015. This paper from ODI and UNDP, authored by Claire Melamed and Andy Sumner, summarises the evidence on the impact of the MDGs, looks at current trends in poverty and in global governance that will affect the shape and the scope of any future agreement on global development.
Download Report
by David Steven | Nov 1, 2011 | Economics and development, Global Dashboard
The MDGs are so over
Having just been rude about one World Bank report, here’s a positive review of another – the Global Monitoring Report 2011, which the Bank produces jointly with the IMF.
The GMR updates progress against the Millennium Development Goals – targets that were set as the culmination of a push throughout the 1990s to take poverty to the centre of the international agenda.
For a long time, it seemed that the MDGs were going to be an embarrassing failure. In 2009, as the UN prepared for the 2010 MDG review conference, Kofi Annan rang the alarm:
We have been moving too slowly to meet our goals. And today, we face a global economic crisis whose full repercussions have yet to be felt. At the very least, it will throw us off course in a number of key areas, particularly in the developing countries. At worst, it could prevent us from keeping our promises, plunging millions more into poverty and posing a risk of social and political unrest. That is an outcome we must avoid at all costs.
The MDGs’ many critics felt vindicated. In particular, Bill “just asking that aid benefit the poor” Easterly was over the moon. “Let’s face it: it’s over,” he wrote. “The MDGs will not be met.” Idealistic development campaigners had wasted their time on a set of arbitrary and poorly designed goals. Africa had been deliberately made to look like a failure, in what was an unforgiveable set up.
The 2010 MDG summit was a somewhat sombre affair. Sir Bob Geldof (seen saluting the troops, above) demanded that all 189 leaders who agreed the Millennium Declaration should be pulled out of retirement (or the ground, if applicable) to issue a personal apology to him, and the world’s poor. [OK – I made that bit up.]
But wait a minute…
(more…)
by David Steven | Mar 1, 2010 | Africa
Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy today published a working paper today that drops the following bombshell (here’s a free version):
Our main conclusion is that Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than we thought. The growth from the period 1995-2006, far from benefiting only the elites, has been sufficiently widely spread that both total African inequality and African within-country inequality actually declined over this period. In particular, the speed at which Africa has reduced poverty since 1995 puts it on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty relative to 1990 by 2015 on time or, at worst, a couple of years late. If Congo-Zaire converges to Africa once it is stabilized, the MDG will be achieved by 2012, three years before the target date. These results are qualitatively robust to changes in our methodology, including using different data sources and assumptions for what happens to inequality when inequality data is not available.
Not much reaction yet – but I’m intrigued to see what other economists are going to make of their work…
Update: Xavier Sala-i-Martin has a wonderfully crazy Columbia University website – he likes FC Barcelona, Salvador Dali and Beavis and Butthead.
Update II: These Economist articles from 2004 (one, two) offer useful background. The crux of the matter seems to be that Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy use GDP to measure poverty (working out distribution of income from household surveys) – the World Bank’s figures are derived directly from the surveys themselves.
