| Resumen: |
With 2015 marking the transition from the Millennium to the Sustainable Development Goals, the international community can celebrate many development successes since 2000. Despite the global financial crisis, economic growth was generally strong and robust. About 1 billion people rose out of extreme poverty. Most developing countries saw solid income growth for the bottom 40 percent of their income distributions. Millions of children who were unlikely to survive their fifth birthday passed beyond these critical years and went on to school in ever greater numbers. The incidence of preventable diseases such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis is falling.
The share of those with access to clean water and better sanitation has risen. Overall, the Millennium Development Goals played an important role in galvanizing the global development community, and that experience will help drive the progress toward the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Despite solid development gains, progress has been uneven and significant work remains. With an estimated 900 million people in 2012 on less than $1.90 a day —the updated international poverty line— and a projected 700 million in 2015, extreme poverty still remains unacceptably high. It has also become more concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Addressing moderate poverty and mitigating the vulnerability of falling back into poverty have become more pressing issues in many countries, especially in those where the bottom 40 percent saw their incomes decline. Even in a world of single-digit extreme poverty, non-income disparities, like limited access to quality education and health services, pose a bottleneck to poverty reduction and shared prosperity. Wider environmental sustainability concerns are a major challenge in much of the world, both in terms of climate change and the impact on the natural resources upon which many of the poorest depend, such as water. In sum, while development progress was impressive, it has been uneven and a large unfinished agenda remains.
Three key challenges stand out: the depth of remaining poverty, the unevenness in shared prosperity, and the persistent disparities in non-income dimensions of development.
First, the policy discourse needs to focus more directly on the poorest among the poor. While pockets of ultra-poverty exist around the world, Sub-Saharan Africa is home to most of the deeply poor. To make depth a more central element in policy formulation, easy-to-communicate measures are needed— and this note attempts a step in this direction with person-equivalent measures of poverty.
Second, the eradication of poverty in all of its forms requires steady growth of the incomes of the bottom 40 percent. Yet, economic growth — a key driver of shared prosperity—may not be as buoyant as before the global financial crisis. Third, unequal progress in non-income dimensions of development requires addressing widespread inequality of opportunity, which transmits poverty across generations and erodes the pace and sustainability of progress for the bottom 40. To meet these challenges, three ingredients are core to the policy agenda: sustaining broad-based growth, investing in human development, and insuring the poor and vulnerable against emerging risks. |
