Global Poverty Drops Sharply, With China Making Big Strides, U.N. Report Says
Dire poverty has dropped sharply, and just as many girls as boys are now enrolled in primary schools around the world. Simple measures like installing bed nets have prevented some six million deaths from malaria. But nearly one billion people still defecate in the open, endangering the health of many others.
These are among the findings that the United Nations released Monday as part of a final report on the successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets established 15 years ago to improve the lives of the poor.
“The report confirms that the global efforts to achieve the goals have saved millions of lives and improved conditions for millions more around the world,” the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Monday as he released the report in Oslo.
In fact, though, how much of those gains can be attributed to the goals is unknown. The sharp reductions in extreme poverty are due largely to the economic strides made by one big country, China. Likewise, some of the biggest shortfalls can be attributed to a handful of countries that remain very far behind. In India, for example, an estimated 600 million people defecate in the open, heightening the risk of serious disease, especially for children.
Experts said the most important contribution made by the Millennium Development Goals was establishing yardsticks for measuring what countries have and have not done for their people — not just in broad-brush economic indicators but in concrete measures of well-being, like how many women die in childbirth or how many children are clinically malnourished.
“It’s a data revolution, and that’s important in and of itself,” said Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development in Washington. “It has changed the norms of what development is about.”
The findings in the report are likely to figure in contentious debates this summer over the United Nations’ next set of development goals, which world leaders are scheduled to adopt by September. A draft of those goals includes 169 targets that would require huge amounts of aid money to meet and would raise a host of tricky political issues about global trade and climate change.
In releasing the report, United Nations officials celebrated meeting some of the goals. For instance, one of the targets was to halve the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by 2015, but the actual decline was steeper: 14 percent of people in the developing world are extremely poor now, compared with 47 percent in 1990. China did the most, reducing the share of its people in extreme poverty to just 4 percent this year, from 61 percent in 1990.
Other targets were missed, including those to reduce child mortality and women’s deaths in childbirth each by two-thirds, although progress was made on both fronts.
Malaria has been made a far less deadly scourge than it was in 2000, when the targets were set, with the mortality rate down by 58 percent, the report said. Fewer children are dying of measles than in 2000, but measles vaccination coverage has stalled, the report said, and 21.6 million children were not fully immunized in 2013. Most measles deaths were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the report called for greater investments in public health.
South Asia also accounts for the highest levels of child malnutrition, with 28 percent of children who are younger than 5 classified as “moderately or severely underweight.”
Jobs are not keeping pace with population growth in either rich or poor countries, an especially acute challenge for countries like India that have ballooning populations of young people in need of work.
One of the starkest failures acknowledged in the report concerned gender equity. Women are more likely than men to be poor, according to the report, and women’s participation in the global paid labor force has inched up only very slowly.
Critics say that setting global targets alone is not very instructive.
“I’m not opposed to having a global yardstick, but I don’t put much stock in it,” said Dean Karlan, an economics professor at Yale University who studies poverty. “You can’t compare one country to another. It doesn’t give us much, in terms of telling us what to do.”
These are among the findings that the United Nations released Monday as part of a final report on the successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets established 15 years ago to improve the lives of the poor.
“The report confirms that the global efforts to achieve the goals have saved millions of lives and improved conditions for millions more around the world,” the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Monday as he released the report in Oslo.
In fact, though, how much of those gains can be attributed to the goals is unknown. The sharp reductions in extreme poverty are due largely to the economic strides made by one big country, China. Likewise, some of the biggest shortfalls can be attributed to a handful of countries that remain very far behind. In India, for example, an estimated 600 million people defecate in the open, heightening the risk of serious disease, especially for children.
Experts said the most important contribution made by the Millennium Development Goals was establishing yardsticks for measuring what countries have and have not done for their people — not just in broad-brush economic indicators but in concrete measures of well-being, like how many women die in childbirth or how many children are clinically malnourished.
“It’s a data revolution, and that’s important in and of itself,” said Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development in Washington. “It has changed the norms of what development is about.”
The findings in the report are likely to figure in contentious debates this summer over the United Nations’ next set of development goals, which world leaders are scheduled to adopt by September. A draft of those goals includes 169 targets that would require huge amounts of aid money to meet and would raise a host of tricky political issues about global trade and climate change.
In releasing the report, United Nations officials celebrated meeting some of the goals. For instance, one of the targets was to halve the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by 2015, but the actual decline was steeper: 14 percent of people in the developing world are extremely poor now, compared with 47 percent in 1990. China did the most, reducing the share of its people in extreme poverty to just 4 percent this year, from 61 percent in 1990.
Other targets were missed, including those to reduce child mortality and women’s deaths in childbirth each by two-thirds, although progress was made on both fronts.
Malaria has been made a far less deadly scourge than it was in 2000, when the targets were set, with the mortality rate down by 58 percent, the report said. Fewer children are dying of measles than in 2000, but measles vaccination coverage has stalled, the report said, and 21.6 million children were not fully immunized in 2013. Most measles deaths were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the report called for greater investments in public health.
South Asia also accounts for the highest levels of child malnutrition, with 28 percent of children who are younger than 5 classified as “moderately or severely underweight.”
Jobs are not keeping pace with population growth in either rich or poor countries, an especially acute challenge for countries like India that have ballooning populations of young people in need of work.
One of the starkest failures acknowledged in the report concerned gender equity. Women are more likely than men to be poor, according to the report, and women’s participation in the global paid labor force has inched up only very slowly.
Critics say that setting global targets alone is not very instructive.
“I’m not opposed to having a global yardstick, but I don’t put much stock in it,” said Dean Karlan, an economics professor at Yale University who studies poverty. “You can’t compare one country to another. It doesn’t give us much, in terms of telling us what to do.”
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