Reconnecting the MDGs to the Development Agenda

Richard Kozul-WrightEICDC/UNCTAD

October 2010

More questions than answers?

• Where did the MDGs come from?

• Does anyone object to the MDGs?

• How successful have the MDGs been?

• What lies beyond the 2015 deadline?

• What have we learnt about development cooperation?

The Goals

• Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger • Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education • Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower

women • Goal 4: Reduce child mortality • Goal 5: Improve maternal health • Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other

diseases • Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability • Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for

Development

Targets and indicators for Goal 1

• Target 1a: Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day– 1.1 Proportion of population below $1 (PPP) per day 1.2 Poverty

gap ratio 1.3 Share of poorest quintile in national consumption • Target 1b: Achieve full and productive employment and decent

work for all, including women and young people – 1.4 Growth rate of GDP per person employed 1.5 Employment-to-

population ratio 1.6 Proportion of employed people living below $1 (PPP) per day 1.7 Proportion of own-account and contributing family workers in total employment

• Target 1c: Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger– 1.8 Prevalence of underweight children under-five years of age 1.9

Proportion of population below minimum level of dietary energy consumption

Millennium Summit• 5. We believe that the central challenge we face today is to ensure that

globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people. For while globalization offers great opportunities, at present its benefits are very unevenly shared, while its costs are unevenly distributed…only through broad and sustained efforts to create a shared future, based upon our common humanity in all its diversity, can globalization be made fully inclusive and equitable. These efforts must include policies and measures, at the global level, which correspond to the needs of developing countries and economies in transition and are formulated and implemented with their effective participation.

• 11. We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected. We are committed to making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want.

Filling gaps in the globalization agenda?

• Social gaps

• Governance gaps

• Legitimacy gaps

MDGs would address all these gaps BUT on the assumption that the overall direction of economic policy was maintained indeed accelerated

Does anyone object to the MDGs?

• How were the goals selected? • What do they measure? • Are they connected?• Do they add up?

The accounting of poverty

The poverty of accounting

• Have the MDGs helped tackle deprivation?   • Have the MDGs helped reverse ODA flows?   • Have the MDGs helped address the inequities of

globalisation? 

ODA trends

Growth performance

Growth per capita

-2

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

High Income

China

Other developing

Why has growth failed to deliver?

• Boom.bust/external shocks

• Jobless growth

• Informalisation

• Deindustrialisation

A history of world inequality

Growing apart

A healthy investment climate?

0.00

0.05

0.10

0.15

0.20

0.25

0.30

Gross Fixed Capital Formation

Gross Financial Investment Abroad

Taking off and falling behind

Gross Fixed Capital Formation

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

1980

1982

1984

1986

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

Latin America

Sub-Saharan Africa

East Asia

South Asia

Jobless growth

Jobless growth (cont.,)

Vulnerable Employment Shares, 1996 and 2006

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

WORLD DevelopedEconomies& European

Union

Central &South

EasternEurope

(non-EU) &CIS

East Asia South EastAsia & the

Pacific

South Asia LatinAmerica &

theCaribbean

Middle East sub-SaharanAfrica

North Africa

1996

2006

Policy matters: Towards an inclusive agenda

• Need a growth and employment target• Productive investment is critical: domestic

resource mobilisation needs international support

• Integrated macro, sectoral and trade policies• Tackle inequality: regulate finance;more

universal access to services• Encourage developmental states

Development cooperation

• Do Paris and Accra solve the problem?

• Money isn`t everything but it matters – trillion dollar gaps

• Marshall Plan

• A second look at IDA

• South South

Short changed