Design of millennium development goals faulted by experts

Business Daily Africa: Design of millennium development goals faulted by experts

… Economics professor at New York University, William Easterly, says in a research paper that choices made in defining success or failure as achieving numerical targets for MDGs made their attainment “less likely in Africa than in other regions even when its progress was in line with or above historical or contemporary experience of other regions.”

Citing statements from the IMF, WB, and UN, Prof Easterly says the view that Africa will miss all the MDGs has the effect of making African successes look like failures.

“The paper does not argue that Africa’s performance is good in all areas, only that its relative performance looks worse because of the particular way in which the MDG targets are set. As a result, some African successes are portrayed as failures.”

The bid to reduce poverty by half is criticised, one, for ignoring the fact that Africa is coming from a relatively low economic base and, secondly, for turning a blind eye on economic growth indicators that fall below the $1.25 a day threshold.

For example, defining poverty by the phenomenon of people spending less than $1.25 in a day is an absolute position that does not capture positive or negative movements in daily spending under the cut off point.

Similarly, it does not capture positive or negative movements above the $1.25 a day mark, the paper says.

“There is much about the poverty goal that is arbitrary. First… a goal of reducing poverty rates places great value on growth that moves an individual from below to above the absolute poverty line, while it places zero value on growth that increases income of those who still remain below the poverty line. There is no rational basis in welfare economics for such extreme weighting,” Prof Easterly says.

For Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with low per capita income and high initial poverty, achieving the poverty reduction targets means growing at a higher rate than other countries, a Herculean task.

Michael Clemens and Todd Moss of the Centre for Global Development estimate that for Africa to halve poverty by 2015, it will take an average seven per cent year-on-year annual growth.

“Only a handful of countries on earth (seven), in the best of circumstances, grew recently at the rate all of Sub-Saharan Africa would need to grow in order to halve poverty by 2015,” they recently wrote in a paper, What’s wrong with the MDGs? …

… While the goals are not likely to be achieved, a new study shows poverty in Africa has been dropping steadily.

Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, say that not only has poverty fallen in Africa as a whole, but the decline has been remarkable.

“In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral rich as well as mineral poor countries; for countries with favourable or with unfavourable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.”

For instance, the percentage of Africans living on less than $1 a day dropped from 43 per cent in 1995 to about 32 per cent by end of 2006, the lowest poverty rate in over three decades.

The region’s GDP per capita shot from about $1,600 to $1,950 in a similar period.

This finding breaks ranks with the latest UN MDG review which says that poverty rate in Sub-Saharan Africa “stayed above 50 per cent, though there has been some progress since 1999.” …