Are the Millennium Development Goals Unfair to Africa?

Transcript

WILLIAM EASTERLY: Even high growth in Africa is labeled a failure because it doesn’t reduce poverty enough to meet this arbitrary Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by 50 percent. Africa has to have higher growth than other regions to attain the same level of poverty reduction in percentage terms.So this means that we find a way to take what is success in Africa and call it a failure, and that’s going to be kind of theme that is going to come out from all the MDGs. In each case, the design of the MDGs takes a success in Africa and turns it into a failure.

Africa has actually been growing at 5 to 6 percent since the year 2000. Everybody agrees this is one of the best periods in Africa’s history, if not the best, of growth. This is great growth. Yet, the Blair panel says this growth is far short of this 7 percent annual growth that needs to be sustained to make substantial inroads into poverty reduction. They were thinking of the percentage change in poverty. The World Bank and the IMF in the Global Monitoring Report ratchet the required growth in Africa to meet this arbitrary percentage change in poverty target even higher.

In summary, there’s been a lot of African achievements in development that have been downplayed by the design of the Millennium Development Goals exercise.

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