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Effectiveness of its 15 year Millennium Development Goals (MDG)

United Nations Expert Challenges UN’s Pet Development Project



The United Nations has refused to publish a recent study by one of its own statisticians employed by the United Nations Population Fund, Dr. Howard Friedman.
The study has upended the conventional wisdom in the UN bureaucracy regarding the effectiveness of its 15 year Millennium Development Goals ("MDG") project that began in 2000. The UN cited as its reason for not publishing Dr. Friedman’s study that he wrote it in his personal capacity while he was on sabbatical from his UN job. Apparently, protocol is more important to UN bureaucrats than openness to empirical evidence that contradicts the UN's official line. Fortunately, Dr. Friedman was able to have his study published independently. The United Nations describes the eight Millennium Development Goals – which range from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education – as “a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions.” The UN’s website goes on to boast that the MDGs “have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest” and “are making a real difference in people’s lives.” Not so fast, concluded the UN statistician, who actually took the time to examine the data. The results that Dr. Friedman set out in his exhaustive empirical study of over 160 pages demonstrated, he said, that "the data does not support the hypothesis that there was a causal link between the initiation of the MDGs in September 2000 and accelerations in the improvement on MDG indicators. Rather, most of the MDG indicators did not experience accelerations. For the subset of indicators that experienced an acceleration, the acceleration usually started prior to the introduction of the MDGs in 2000."

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Although Dr. Friedman did not preclude the possibility that the MDG program was serving a constructive purpose by building on the progress in certain indicators achieved by pre-2000 UN development programs, he saw a more significant causal connection of "the observed changes in the development indicators" to "broader, global economic trends." In response to my question regarding the study to the deputy spokesperson for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the UN's daily press briefing on August 12th, the spokesperson's office later e-mailed me a brief critique. Among other things, the spokesperson's office wrote, Dr. Friedman's study used "only a subset of the data, assessing only 19 of the 60 MDG indicators, and the data sources used are not the official UN-MDG indicator data base which is compiled by an inter-agency and expert group of statisticians, including country experts." The response added that the UN remained confident in its own analysis which "has shown that the MDGs have made a significant, demonstrable effect in the world's poorest regions." To buttress its case, the spokesperson's office referred me to an article written in response to the study’s conclusions by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals. Predictably, Dr. Sachs vigorously defended the UN's development project in which he has invested so much time, and with which he will remain associated in planning for post-2015 with the MDG successor, the Sustainable Development Goals. While Dr. Sachs conceded that there were regions within the developing world where poverty reduction was indeed already accelerating before the advent of the MDGs just as Dr. Friedman had found, Dr. Sachs claimed that in Sub-Saharan Africa, the "world’s poorest region," the Millennium Development Program did make a profound difference. He presented data purporting to demonstrate "accelerated improvement in poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa after 2000" for several key MDG indicators such as the overall poverty rate, under 5 years of age mortality rate, malaria deaths and maternal mortality. From his sketchy data, far less than Dr. Friedman presented, Dr. Sachs took a leap of faith and concluded that "In Sub-Saharan Africa, the MDGs certainly played an important role in improved progress after the year 2000." Dr. Friedman, by the way, did not preclude the possibility that the MDGs might have helped accelerate development in some respects in the Sub-Saharan region, but that is a far cry from being as certain about cause and effect as Jeffrey Sachs appears to be. The problem with Dr. Sachs' leap of faith is that it is undermined by one other data point that he included in his article - the growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the region. GDP growth is not one of the MDG indicators but, Dr. Sachs concedes, is nevertheless "an important contributor to poverty reduction and other goals." The economic growth rate per annum more than doubled (from 2.3 percent per annum to 5.7 percent per annum) during the post-2000 period according to the data Dr. Sachs referenced in his article. Yet Dr. Sachs understated the importance of this GDP growth, which occurred independently of the UN's MDG project but could well have been the principal contributor to the accelerating improvement in the various MDG indicators that he cited. In other words, with or without the expensive top-down centralized planning that the UN's MDG project epitomizes, improvements in the poverty rate and other MDG indicators would likely have accelerated in tandem with the rapid GDP growth that the Sub-Sahara region was experiencing. The reason why Dr. Friedman’s study is important is that it calls into question the global wealth transfer model upon which the UN’s MDG project is based. Many billions of dollars in the form of development aid have been transferred directly from the taxpayers of the more developed countries to the often bureaucratic or corrupt governments in developing countries. Even under the best of circumstances, there has been little net positive impact that would not have happened anyway without all of the UN-directed central planning. The UN bureaucracy is gearing up for an even more ambitious post 2015 development program with the re-branded title, Sustainable Development Goals. The last thing the UN bureaucrats needed was the publicizing of a rigorous study by one of its own statisticians that calls into question the worth of the UN’s ever expanding development funding industry.


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Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist -- Bio and Archives

Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.


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