In Brief

Elusive MDGs

With seven years gone and eight to go, the global community has little to celebrate. In 2000, with great fanfare, world leaders pledged to boost living standards by achieving eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)-covering poverty, health, education, gender, and the environment- by 2015. But halfway through, although much progress has been made on some fronts, most of the MDGs remain stubbornly out of reach for most regions, according to the fourth annual Global Monitoring Report , produced jointly by the IMF and the World Bank.

Continued rapid global growth would help-although for some countries, the sustainability and quality of growth is being undermined by unsustainable resource extraction and pollution. The global community now needs to quickly scale up aid, show greater policy coherence, and better align assistance around national development strategies. It also needs to tackle two major risks to a brighter outlook: an unacceptably high level of gender inequality (see article on page 6) and the greater needs of fragile states (see box).

Missing by a long shot

The largest "MDG deficit" is in states with lax law and order, stymied by weak institutions and corruption, and often racked by civil conflict. With 9 percent of the developing world's population-nearly 500 million people- these fragile states account for over 25 of the world's extreme poor.

Despite the paucity of recent poverty data for fragile states, it is possible to construct a picture of progress for representative fragile and nonfragile states by inferring poverty rates from the average GDP per capita levels at purchasing power parity for these two groups of countries, and drawing on growth forecasts through 2015. The analysis shows that the average poverty level in fragile states has worsened since 1990, and these states will face an extreme poverty incidence of over 50 percent in 2015, falling far short of their income poverty target of 24.5 percent (see chart). On the health and education fronts, the news is similarly discouraging: fragile states account for nearly one-third of child deaths and for one-third of all 12-year-olds who fail to complete primary school. Moreover, if these states are not helped, they pose risks that may readily cross borders-through civil conflicts, risks to public health, and humanitarian crises.

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