Attainment of multidimensional poverty target of sustainable development goals: a preliminary study

ABSTRACT

Using recent data, this study compares observed rates of decline in multidimensional poverty headcount with the rates required to reduce the headcount by one-half as envisaged in SDG Target 1.2. It is found that in a majority of countries, that contain an overwhelming proportion of multidimensionally poor people, observed rates of headcount reduction are not enough to lower multidimensional poverty headcount by one-half during the SDG period.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable development goals
• multidimensional poverty
• developing countries
• SDG 1.2 attainment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I30
• I32

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For example, Ramos (2019) indicates that alleviating extreme poverty below the World Bank’s 3% target by 2030 has a very low probability. He did not consider the prospects for multidimensional poverty reduction.

² Construction of multidimensional poverty index was updated in 2018, and the update has been explained in OPHI (2018).

³ Additional details about descriptive statistics for the countries are available from the author. Santos, Dabus, and Delbianco (2019) include more countries, but harmonization of their poverty data is uncertain.

⁴ If the ‘marginal’ category is eliminated, a larger proportion of multidimensionally poor persons will be in countries that are not likely to make the target.

⁵ Ahimbisibwe and Ram (2019) show that rate of improvement in most indicators was higher during 2000-2015 than during 1990-2000 prior to the Millennium Declaration.

⁶ India’s pace of reduction in extreme poverty was higher during the last years of the MDG period. World Bank (http://povertydata.worldbank.org) shows India’s $1.90 poverty headcount as 31.1% in 2009 and 21.2% in 2011.