How the Millennium Development Goals are Unfair to Africa

William Easterly

World Development, 2009, vol. 37, issue 1, 26-35

Abstract: Summary Those involved in the millennium development goal (MDG) campaign routinely state "Africa will miss all the MDGs." This paper argues that a series of arbitrary choices made in defining "success" or "failure" as achieving numerical targets for the MDGs made attainment of the MDGs less likely in Africa than in other regions even when its progress was in line with or above historical or contemporary experience of other regions. The statement that "Africa will miss all the MDGs" thus has the unfortunate effect of making African successes look like failures.

Keywords: human; development; millennium; development; goals; poverty; foreign; aid; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (105)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305-750X(08)00102-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:37:y:2009:i:1:p:26-35

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().