There are as many figures pointing to a country’s progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as there are grains of sand on a beach.
What is known about a country’s progress towards the MDGs also depends on whose figures you look at.
As the World Summit deadline approaches, governments wish to demonstrate how well they have been doing in honouring their commitments. But there is little enough to show. Most figures in fact are from 2000 to 2001, indicating that whatever progress shown is not a direct result of the radical policy shifts required by the MDG targets that were only set in 2001.
The Millennium Declaration states that its first target is ”to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than $1 a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger”.
The MDG indicators database, however, has added a little, but significant change to the declaration: ”to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day”.
Using this yardstick, Chile has already halved the proportion of people living in extreme poverty or on less than $1 a day, while Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay are on target to do so, says a report issued in June by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
According to the United Nations statistics division (updated on April 19 this year), Chile had 6% of its population in extreme poverty in 1990 and just 2% in 2000. By using 1990 as the starting point, Chile had achieved its 2015 goal before even starting the race.
Brazil’s figures were 14% in extreme poverty in 1990, 10% in 1998, and 8% in 2001. Mexico has no data for 1990, but in 1995, 16% of its population lived on less than $1 a day, and in 2000 the figure was 10%.
Going by the declaration, made in 2000, Mexico will only have to reduce its extreme poverty rate by 5%. But, using the MDG indicators database measurement which begins in 1990 — the country will have to reduce the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day by 8%.
What is known about a country’s progress towards the MDGs also depends on whose figures you look at. There are even contradictory data within the UN family as each agency appears to be using a different set of figures.
ECLAC uses a World Bank figure from a year ago, to point out that in Mexico the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day had shrunk from 24,2% to 20,3% between 2000 and 2002, still way off the 16% and 10% quoted by the UN statistics division.
Adding to the confusion of numbers, there is no guarantee of compliance with the MDGs, because of the danger of financial turmoil or economic or political crises, Rebecca Grynspan, ECLAC director for Central America and Mexico, said.
In addition, the skewed distribution of wealth, which undermines progress towards poverty alleviation, persists in many countries, she added. Latin America has the largest gap between the rich and poor.
In Mexico, for example, several studies indicate that the number of people living in poverty, as measured strictly on the basis of income, has been shrinking, and others show that this has had no effect on social inequalities.
The UN statistics division shows that the poorest 20% of Mexicans consumed only 3,1% of the national wealth in 2000.
For 32-year-old Guadalupe, one of the army of poor who scavenge for recyclable materials on the streets of Mexico City, the numbers game means nothing. ”I’m earning more by collecting cans instead of just paper like before. But nothing has changed,” she said.
TerraViva is a newspaper published by IPS