The 2015 Poverty Target One of the International Development Targets

One of the International Development Targets agreed by the UN Social Summit in 1995 is to halve the 1990 incidence of dollar-a-day poverty in developing and transitional countries by 2015. This note estimates progress towards that target. If China, each country in South Asia, and each other region changes incidence in 1998-2015 at the same rate as in 1990-98, then overall dollar poverty incidence will fall from 29.0 percent in 1990 to 23.2 percent in 2015. This is only 40 percent of the UN target reduction (a halving to 14.5 percent dollar poverty incidence). A recent report prepared by the Poverty Research Unit at Sussex [ IFAD, 2001] shows, however, that re-emphasising employment-intensive agricultural and rural growth, especially of food staples, and asset distribution can revive the faltering progress towards these targets. The International Fund for Agricultural Development's Rural Poverty Report (2001; hereafter RPR), argued that big changes were needed to meet the UN Social Summit target of halving 'incidence of dollar poverty in developing and transitional countries' (hereafter called 'global' poverty) in 1990-2015. This target was endorsed as the guiding principle of aid by the OECD donors in 1996 and by the G7 Finance Ministers in 2001. Far from arguing that this target was 'doomed to failure', the RPR showed that sufficient poverty reduction to meet the target had been achieved in many places and times-when, and where, there was rapid, poverty-oriented, employment-intensive rural development, usually based on rising yields of food staples. Unfortunately, progress in staples food yields and land reform slowed right down between the 1970s and the 1990s, as did poverty reduction. Between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the real value of aid to agriculture fell by almost two-thirds. There has been considerable disagreement about whether, or to what extent, the world is 'on track' to meet the UN/OECD/G7 poverty target. The agreed method of checking progress is from the 1990 and 1998 estimates of 'share of developing and transitional population living on less than one dollar a day poverty '