New MDG progress index

How well are individual countries progressing towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)? Despite an extraordinary public campaign to mobilize support for the MDGs, including the UN MDG Summit in New York in September 2010, until now, there has remarkably little effort to track progress at the country level in a way that non-specialists could readily understand.

Researchers Benjamin Leo and Julia Barmeier from the Center for Global Development introduce an MDG Progress Index to assess how on or off track countries are toward achieving the goals in the working paper "Who Are the MDG Trailblazers? A New MDG Progress Index" The paper can be accessed online here: http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424377

The index assesses individual country performance in eight core MDG targets (extreme poverty, hunger, education, gender, child mortality, maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS, and water). For each target, the Index compares a country’s actual performance over time with the rate of improvement needed to reach the target by 2015.

The paper found evidence of dramatic achievements by many poor countries, such as Honduras, Laos, Ethiopia, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Nepal, Cambodia, and Ghana. These countries’ performance suggests that they may achieve most of the MDGs. Moreover, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for many of the star MDG performers. Interestingly, poor countries perform nearly on par with middle-income countries.

Not surprisingly, the list of laggards largely consists of countries devastated by conflict over the last few decades, such as Afghanistan, Burundi, the DRC, and Guinea-Bissau. Most countries fall somewhere in between, demonstrating solid progress on some indicators and little on others.

In addition, individual country scorecards were elaborated for all of the 76 Low Income Countries, drawn from the data in the working paper. See information by country here: http://www.cgdev.org/section/topics/poverty/mdg_scorecards