Goal-based development and the SDGs: implications for development finance
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 31, Issue 3-4, AUTUMN-WINTER 2015, Pages 268–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grv031
Published: 09 December 2015
The 193 member states of the United Nations have now adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the period 2016–30 to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were in effect during 2000–15. The MDGs focused on reducing extreme poverty; the SDGs focus on sustainable development, meaning the holistic achievement of economic development, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. These goals are valuable in so far as they push the world community to achieve quantified, time-bound objectives.
It is fairly easy to declare that we should fight poverty, hunger, and disease, or resist human-induced climate change. Such platitudes are easily stated, and alas, also easily ignored. It is quite a different thing to agree that the world should cut the rate of $1.25-per-day poverty by half between 1990 and 2015 as in MDG 1, or reduce under-5...