The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success

Growing concern that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be achieved by 2015 should not obscure the bigger picture that development progress has been occurring at unprecedented levels over the past thirty or more years. At the same time, the MDGs may perhaps create an unnecessary pessimism toward aid by labeling many development successes as failures. The first MDG of halving the number of people living in poverty will probably be met globally, but for most developing countries to achieve this at the national level, the growth rates required are at the bounds of historical precedent. Additionally, there appears to be only a weak relationship between aid and rapid economic growth. A similar problem holds for many of the other education and health goals. For many countries, the rates of progress required to meet the MDGs by 2015 are extremely high compared to historical experience and there is only a tenuous relationship between expenditure and outcomes. Nevertheless, estimates that an additional $50 billion in aid per year is necessary to meet the MDGs are frequently misinterpreted to suggest that it is also sufficient. Most of the goals are unlikely to be reached, but this will probably not be due primarily to shortfalls in aid. This is in part because development is a long-term and complex process dependent on relieving more than a supply-side constraint on resources. Aid remains vital and contributes to development progress, but even considerable increases in aid are unlikely to buy these particular goals. Goal setting is also useful, but continuing to suggest that the MDGs can be met may undermine future constituencies for aid (in donors) and reform (in recipients). The MDGs might be better viewed not as realistic targets but as reminders of the stark contrast between the world we want and the world we have, and a call to redouble our search for interventions to close the gap.Millennium Development Goals poverty economic growth

Poverty in Malawi, 1998

"This paper presents the poverty analysis of the 1997 98 Malawi Integrated Household Survey. The analysis developed basic needs poverty lines, using consumption-based measures of welfare to classify households and individuals as poor and nonpoor. Because consumption data were not of uniform quality across sample households, the analysis made adjustments to derive a more accurate assessment of the incidence of poverty across the country. The analysis provides poverty and inequality estimates for Malawi's population. About 65 percent were unable to meet their basic needs, and poverty was deep and pervasive. The distribution of household welfare was loosely examined within the context of the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy to guide government action in helping poor households improve their own well-being." Authors' AbstractPoverty ,poverty analysis ,

Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals, and Misperceptions

We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the price-to-rent ratio, and the price-to-income ratio can be misleading because they fail to account both for the time series pattern of real long-term interest rates and predictable differences in the long-run growth rates of house prices across local markets. These factors are especially important in recent years because house prices are theoretically more sensitive to interest rates when rates are already low, and more sensitive still in those cities where the long-run rate of house price growth is high. During the 1980s, our measures show that houses looked most overvalued in many of the same cities that subsequently experienced the largest house price declines. We find that from the trough of 1995 to 2004, the cost of owning rose somewhat relative to the cost of renting, but not, in most cities, to levels that made houses look overvalued.

A descriptive and evaluative examiniation of Iowa behavior disorder students, procedures, and programs

This study described and evaluated a broad array of the practices in the education and treatment of behaviorally disordered (BD) students in Iowa. A 10% random sample of BD students, stratified by Area Education Agency and program model, was selected for study. A data collection instrument was distributed to the special education support personnel and teachers of these students asking for information regarding student characteristics, teacher characteristics, program characteristics, evaluation and placement procedures, the individualized education program, curriculum and intervention, support services, and integration/exit procedures. Of 632 instruments distributed, 463 were returned for an overall return rate of 73%. Primary findings were those that (1) documented shortcomings in the evaluation/diagnostic procedures and the incongruence of the evaluation data with the student\u27s individualized education program, (2) demonstrated lack of empirical support for program model differentiation and student severity weightings as they were used in the educational programs for these students, and (3) indicated a need for additional and more effective support services for the parents of BD students. Additional descriptive findings were provided with respect to a wide variety of student, teacher, and program characteristics

A study of the mechanisms underlying the cardiac effects of exercise training in angina pectoris

This thesis investigates the use of exercise training as a therapy in the management of angina pectoris. The hypothesis underlying this work is that in the presence of ischaemia the myocardium will, if possible, respond in such a way as to minimise the effects of ischaemia. Improved collateral function was felt to be the most likely mechanism.A series of non-invasive investigations was developed in such a way as to make them useful for the detection of any possible improvement in myocardial ischaemia. These investigations included treadmill exercise tolerance testing, Thallium scintigraphy, Technetium ventriculography, exercise echocardiography and 24 hour ambulatory ECG monitoring. These techniques were refined for use in this study by the development of computerised analysis where appropriate.Forty male patients under 60 years of age with angina pectoris and no prior myocardial damage were recruited and randomised into exercise and control groups. Both groups were followed up over a one year period, the exercise group carrying out a brief daily home-based exercise programme, using the Canadian Airforce PBX Program for Physical Fitness.The techniques developed proved to be effective follow up tools in this group. Using them significant improvements in treadmill performance were demonstrated in the exercise group. These improvements were found to be partly due to changes in the peripheral control of exercise induced heart rate increases but viii also due to myocardial improvements. The peripheral effects were compared to and contrasted with betablockade. Within the myocardium significant reductions in ischaemic area were demonstrated, particularly in the territory of the left anterior descending coronary artery. These improvements in perfusion were accompanied by improvements in left ventricular function and regional wall motion. The improvements demonstrated in the laboratory were also evident during ambulatory ECG monitoring.The results demonstrated support the hypothesis outlined that controlled myocardial ischaemia can induce improvements in myocardial perfusion, perhaps due to collateral enhancement, and furthermore support the use of these techniques in such follow up studies.Further studies would be justified and indeed necessary to convincingly prove the hypothesis. Such studies may need to be multicentre in order to recruit sufficient numbers and ideally should involve coronary angiography and coronary perfusion assessment

Perspectives on Ageing: A Young-Earth Creation Diversification Model

The AGEing model proposes that intrabaraminic diversification occurred because of the action of transposable and repetitive elements, called Altruistic Genetic Elements (AGEs). Since the model was proposed in 1999, much new evidence has come to light, some of which supports the model and some of which calls for a significant revision of the model. Evidence of AGE/gene association, AGE horizontal transfer, and AGE-induced genetic changes all support the original AGEing model. Evidence of extensive genomic rearrangement, bacterial plasmids, and AGE transposition control requires substantial modification of the AGEing model. A new model of diversification based on these evidences will be introduced and explained

Asset Prices in a Time Series Model with Perpetually Disparately Informed, Competitive Traders

This paper develops a dynamic asset pricing model with persistent heterogeneous beliefs. The model features competitive traders who receive idiosyncratic signals about an underlying fundamentals process. We adapt Futia’s (1981) frequency domain methods to derive conditions on the fundamentals that guarantee noninvertibility of the mapping between observed market data and the underlying shocks to agents’ information sets. When these conditions are satisfied, agents must ‘forecast the forecasts of others’. The paper provides an explicit analytical characterization of the resulting higher-order belief dynamics. These additional dynamics can explain apparent violations of variance bounds and rejections of cross-equation restrictions.Asymmetric Information, Blaschke Factors

The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the UN in 2000. However, the rates of progress required by many of the goals are at the edges of or beyond historical precedent. At the same time, there appear to be limits to the degree to which aid can contribute to development outcomes. Estimates of the ‘cost’ of reaching the MDGs are nevertheless frequently misinterpreted to mean that a certain quantity of aid—such as the oft-cited $50 billion—could cause the Goals to be met. Despite many benefits of the MDGs, there has been little discussion so far of potential costs of the specific form taken by these goals, especially the creation of unreasonable expectations about what is achievable in a short time frame and about the role of aid in the development process. Many countries making extraordinarily rapid progress on MDG indicators, due in large part to aid, will nonetheless not reach the MDGs. Unrealistic targets thus may turn successes into perceptions of failure, serving to undermine future constituencies for aid (in donors) and reform (in recipients). This would be unfortunate given the vital role of aid and reform in the development process and the need for long-term, sustained aid commitments. Though goal-setting can be useful, these particular goals might be better viewed not as practical targets but instead as valuable reminders of the stark contrast between the world we have and the world we want, and as a call to redouble our search for interventions to close the gap more rapidly.Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), development assistance