Elsevier

World Development

Volume 35, Issue 5, May 2007, Pages 735-751
World Development

The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2006.08.003Get rights and content

Summary

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set targets that are implausible for a large number of countries. Many aid recipients will miss the goals, notwithstanding rapid progress by historical standards. Available estimates of the “cost” of the MDGs constitute necessary expenditures if the goals were to somehow be met, not expenditures that are sufficient for them to be met. Aid is on the rise; but when other necessary conditions fail to materialize, aid advocates who have claimed that more aid is sufficient may find aid blamed for false “failures,” undermining the constituency for sustained engagement with poor countries.

Introduction

In September 2000 at the United Nations, 147 presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs—the largest-ever gathering of heads of state—unanimously adopted the Millennium Declaration, committing themselves to a series of international development objectives to be reached by 2015. They include halving poverty headcounts, achieving universal primary school completion, and cutting child mortality rates by two-thirds. Known since 2001 as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they are “commonly accepted as a framework for measuring development progress,” according to the World Bank. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (2003) has described them as “ambititious [but] technically feasible.”1

Several major studies proceeded to estimate how much money would be required to reach the goals, arriving at figures in the range of $40–70 billion in extra resources each year. Fifty billion dollars is the most commonly cited figure for new annual aid requirements. Crucially, none of the credible “costing” studies suggested that this expenditure was a sufficient condition for meeting the goals. All of them emphasized several other necessary conditions over which donors have little control, such as economic growth and improved policies and institutions. For the universal primary education goal, for example, the costing studies calculated how much it would cost to educate all children if somehow all children were in school once these other necessary conditions were met.

Today it appears that the global goal of halving poverty will soon be reached because of rapid progress by India and China.2 However, it is almost certain that the majority of developing countries will not meet many of the other goals. And some whole regions, especially sub-Saharan Africa, will miss them by a wide margin (Sahn & Stifel, 2003). Of 47 African countries, 42 are considered “off track” for at least half of the targets and 12 are “off track” for all targets. Meeting the goals for the majority of country indicators would require more than doubling the rate of progress (Carceles, Fredriksen, & Watt, 2001). Bruns, Mingat, and Rakotomalala (2003) estimate that 86 out of 155 countries are at risk of not achieving the goal of universal primary education. Twenty-seven of these countries are not even expected to break the 50% completion threshold by 2015. These forecasts exclude the 16 developing countries with no data—all of which are likely to have extremely low indicators. The UNDP (2003) estimates that, on current rates of progress, sub-Saharan Africa would not meet the hunger, primary education and child mortality targets for at least another century.

This apparently bleak state of affairs is already leading to complaints that the rich countries are not living up to their end of the MDG bargain.3 The eighth Development Goal commits rich countries to allow greater trade access, reduce debts, and increase aid. Total official development assistance (ODA) from the main international donors rose from $53 billion in 2000 to $80 billion in 2004 (OECD, 2005, Table 4), and is likely to have doubled from 2000 levels by about 2007. There has been substantial progress in multilateral debt reduction. Other rich country policies have not become significantly more favorable to developing countries, notably their interventions in agricultural markets.

If and when most of the MDGs are formally missed in 2015, recipients are likely to stress donors’ failings and some donors will doubtless point to corruption, natural disasters, and other challenges faced by recipients. Both arguments would be largely incorrect; the goals will be missed primarily because of how they were set and the fundamental limitations of aid and other policies. Continued focus on the goals as they are may encourage such unproductive debate and undermine political support for long-term engagement and partnership between rich world and poor.

This is not the first study to suggest that the MDGs will not be met; Fay, Leipziger, Wodon, and Yepes (2005) document that most of the goals are out of reach on current trends. It is also not the first study to discuss drawbacks of the goals. White and Black (2004, p. 16) point out that the goals suffer from diminished effectiveness because accountability for failing to meet them is diffuse, and Maxwell (2003) argues that they may reward oversimplified interventions overemphasizing social indicators at the expense of economic growth. These papers suggest that complementary policy tools could remedy the flaws of the MDGs; we go further. First, we suggest that the goals as a set are impossible to meet because of how they were designed, not primarily because of lack of policy effort, commitment, or aid. Second, we claim that continued commitment to several impossible targets within the MDGs may bring not just decreased political benefits to aid advocates but also increased political costs. The trouble with the MDGs lies not in their stars, but in themselves.

Section snippets

Misinterpreting the MDG “costing” studies

The MDGs began as a review of development policy by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD (1996). From the beginning, the MDGs were linked to the need for greater donor financing. In early documents the major aid agencies stated bluntly: “Development costs money …. the high-income countries need to supply more aid” (OECD, UN, World Bank, & IMF, 2000, p. 23). The Monterrey Consensus of the United Nations (2002) proclaimed that “a substantial increase in ODA and other resources will be

Halving poverty: MDG one

The first MDG is to halve the 1990 poverty headcount by 2015. On a global scale, this goal is very likely to be reached, almost entirely because of poverty reduction in fast-growing India and China. It may already have been reached (Bhalla, 2002, World Bank, 2004b). At the same time, the majority of individual countries appear very unlikely to halve poverty by 2015 because the required economic growth would be extremely high by historical standards. At the same time, it is doubtful that

Reaching the social sector goals

We turn now to the MDGs for health and education. There is a large literature on the complex relationships between conditions, interventions, and outcomes, but this appears to have been neglected in much public discussion of the MDGs. Most health or education indicators are, across countries, closely related to income (Pritchett & Summers, 1996). Over time, progress on these indicators as well as many others tested by Easterly (1999) is not correlated with the rate of growth in that country,

Making the perfect the enemy of the good

Some would have it that evidence based on past experience is useless and irrelevant to policy—arguing that was then, this is now. We invite reflection on the diversity of policies and circumstances represented by the outcomes in these historical data. The changes in development indicators shown there represent the efforts of countries with vast natural resources alongside those with almost none; countries in conflict and at peace; donor darlings and global pariahs; those with heightened access

Re-interpreting the GOALS

The MDAs can be understood in two ways. One approach is to take them literally, as real targets of the development community, and to take the costing study estimates as the amount of aid needed to reach those goals. In this view the MDGs are an important mechanism for raising aid flows and ensuring accountability for donor promises. A big push on aid can, the view holds, accelerate progress beyond historical norms and meet the MDGs. Perhaps such outcomes will be achieved, particularly regarding

Acknowledgement

We thank Alicia Bannon and Scott Standley for excellent research assistance, and Colin Bradford, Bill Cline, Shanta Devarajan, Kim Elliott, Alan Gelb, Eveline Herfkens, Julie Kennedy, Maureen Lewis, John MacArthur, Steve Radelet, David Roodman, Markus Scheuermaier, Gayle Smith, Peter Timmer, Jeremy Weinstein, John Williamson, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft. We also thank the many participants at presentations of the paper at the World Bank, the Executive

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