"Millennium Development Goals: The eight commandments"

From The Economist, July 5,2007. (Subscription required.)

This article reviews progress made to date on the MDGs. "Sadly, the UN family is better at making goals than meeting them. In 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the world urged itself to provide safe water and sanitation for all by the end of the 1980s. In 1990 the UN renewed the call, extending the deadline to the end of the century. In 1978 in what is now Almaty, Kazakhstan, governments promised “health for all” by 2000. In 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand, they called for universal primary schooling by 2000, a goal pushed back to 2015 ten years later. Kevin Watkins, the lead author of the UN's yearly Human Development Report, worries that the pledges the UN mints so readily may become a “debased currency”. In the summer of 2005, at the height of a campaign to “make poverty history”, only 3% of Britons thought the world would meet the 2015 goal of halving poverty, defined as the proportion of people who live on less than the equivalent of a dollar a day. Such fatalism is as unwarranted as complacency. The world is making unprecedented progress against poverty. Thanks to miraculous growth in China and India, the first MDG target should be met. Almost 32% of people in the developing world lived on less than a dollar a day in 1990. In 2004 that figure was 19.2%. It should fall below 16% by 2015.}" The article notes the lack of progress on the MDGs in most of Africa. It sites the difference of opinions among economists on development strategy, citing Jeffrey Sachs, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock.