DEVELOPMENT: Prospects Dim for Reaching Social Development Targets

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 29 2001 (IPS) - Anti-poverty goals set by international leaders at the September 2000 U.N. Millennium Summit in New York are unlikely to be met by the 2015 deadline given current trends, according to the latest volume of global data compiled by the World Bank.

While some developing countries, notably in East Asia, are within range of meeting most of the goals, much of the rest of the developing world is lagging far behind, according to the Bank.

That includes regions, especially sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, where the Bank and other international financial institutions (IFIs) have had the greatest influence on macro-economic policy and structural reforms over the past decade or more.

Moreover, a general slowdown in the global economy, of the kind predicted just last week by the Bank’s sister agency, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), could make the gap between goals and achievement even wider, according to the report, ‘World Development Indicators 2001’.

The Bank insists that the situation is not hopeless. “If developing countries, donor countries, and international organisations can work together with urgency,” said Nicholas Stern, the Bank’s chief economist, “hundreds of millions of people will then have the opportunities to escape severe deprivation.”

The 396-page Indicators report, the latest in an annual series, offers national, regional, and global statistics on scores of different trends, from basic economic data, such as gross domestic product (GDP) to deforestation, to energy use, and even computer ownership.

Indeed, from a globalisation perspective, one of the more encouraging trends noted in the report on sub-Saharan Africa is that all of the region’s countries are now connected to the Internet, compared with only five in 1995, and that the growth rate of Internet hosts in the region is almost twice that of the world’s average.

The report also illustrates the persistence of yawning gaps in data collection, gaps that would clearly make it more difficult for development planners to figure out how best to promote social goals or even how to determine current trends.

Many of the data on social welfare – as basic as prevailing poverty, unemployment, or even student enrolment rates – are not available for some countries, particularly the poorest, or are as much as 10 or even 15 years old.

“We have compiled these numbers from national statistical services and from dozens of partners in other international institutions,” said Sahida Badiee, director of the Bank’s Development Data Group. “The quality of data has improved greatly in recent years, but we still have a long way to go.”

She said the Bank and other donors are expanding programmes to train developing countries in data collection and analysis.

The Millennium Summit, which was designed to galvanise world opinion around fighting poverty, set six main goals.

They included halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015; enrolling all children in primary school by 2015; eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005; and reducing infant and child-mortality rates by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015.

The leaders also called for reducing maternal mortality ratios by 75 percent between 1990 and 2015 and ensuring access to all who need reproductive health care by 2015.

While virtually all regions show improvement in health care and, in many cases, significant advances in eliminating gender disparities in education over the past decade, only East Asia is on track to meet all goals in these areas set forth in the Millennium Summit, according to the report.

Even in that case, however, there has been relatively slow progress over the last ten years in reducing infant mortality in China and Vietnam, for example. In Indonesia, primary school enrolment apparently fell from 100 percent for boys and 95 percent for girls in 1990, to 96 percent and 93 percent, respectively, in 1997, even before the financial crisis which broke out at the end of that year had wrought its worst damage.

On infant mortality, Latin America and the Caribbean had the strongest showing, cutting the rate by 25 percent between 1990 and 1999, or from 41 to 30 live births per thousand, lower than any other developing region except the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Although it started from higher infant and child mortality levels, South Asia made important progress over the past decade, particularly in reducing child mortality by more than 20 percent, from 121 to 99 deaths for every 1000 children under five.

By contrast, the child death rate actually increased in sub- Saharan Africa, which has had to cope with an AIDS pandemic comparable in its impact to Europe’s 14th century Black Plague, from 155 to 161 for every 1,000 children during the decade, even as the region brought down infant death rates by close to ten percent, from 101 to 92.

Poverty figures provided in the report are in many ways even more discouraging. It estimated the number of people living on less than one dollar a day in 1998 at 1.2 billion, or 100 million fewer were living in absolute poverty in 1990. In percentage terms, that translates from a drop of 29 percent to 23 percent of the world’s population, or a reduction of 20 percent.

But a closer look at the data suggests that those estimates may be conservative, as they are based on data collected before or during 1997 – before the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis which wreaked havoc on many middle-income countries from Indonesia to Argentina.

What progress was made in reducing absolute poverty between 1990 and 1998, according to the report, was confined mainly to East Asia, the region hit hardest by the financial crisis.

In other regions, virtually no progress was reported. The number of absolute poor actually increased between 1990 and 1998 in both South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, while in Latin America, the number fell from an estimated 74 million to 61 million.

If the average annual economic growth rate of developing countries after 2001 is only 2.3 percent, according to the report, the number of absolute poor will decline only slightly by the 2015 deadline, and in Africa, which has a higher population growth rate, it will actually increase by 25 percent.

If the average growth rate reaches 3.7 percent, the goal of halving the proportion of people living in absolute poverty can be achieved in every region, except Africa, according to the report which noted that India’s and China’s performance will be especially important to the outcome.

Even if the more optimistic scenario is realised, however, the report says there will still be 2.3 billion people living on less than two dollars a day ¡ a limit that represents extreme poverty in many middle-income countries. That would only be a reduction of about 25 percent from 1990 levels.