Beyond 2015: Assessing the Economic Sustainability of the Millennium Development Goal on Poverty

The Millennium Development Goal on poverty reduction aspires to halve global poverty from 1990 levels by the year 2015. Yet little attention is paid to the sustainability of the economic programs by which countries attempt to attain these poverty targets. Using recent development in indicators of sustainability, namely genuine savings, this paper demonstrates that there exist 58 countries worldwide in which the total productive base per capita was shrinking from 1995 to 2001. Six of these countries were selected for further study on the criterion that they appear to possess sufficient levels of average economic growth per capita to reach their MDG poverty goal. However, a detailed examination suggests that, despite such seemingly solid economic performance, genuine wealth per capita is being rapidly deteriorated. Their economic paths are almost certainly unsustainable. If such trends persist, there is substantial reason to suspect that poverty in these countries will increase in the (possibly near) future.