Monitoring Sustainable Development: Lessons from MDG, Challenges for SDG

Resumen

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) have been conceived ascombination of human needs and basic rights that every individual around theworld should be able to enjoy. According to the United Nations MillenniumDeclaration a list of eight goals has been agreed together with specific targetsto be achieved by 2015.Once this milestone has come, the monitoring of MDG pose a challenge, notonly for the less developed countries (where a “data revolution” is needed),but also for developed countries, since some indicators are reported with verylong lags, data coverage remains erratic and national statistical systems lackthe capacity to generate high-quality data.Furthermore, world leaders have recently agreed the new SustainableDevelopment Goals (SDG) connecting the issues of multidimensionalpoverty, inequality and exclusion, and sustainability. Although themethodology of SDG monitoring is still under development, a recent reportby the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN, 2015) proposes100 indicators and 10 principles for global monitoring indicators,emphasizing the need of simplicity, high frequency and disaggregation.In this context, our paper provides an overview of the MDG achievementsunder the Poverty-Growth-Environment approach. A performance index isproposed with the aim of measuring progress towards the MDG goals indifferent countries, also analyzing the existing relationships between goalperformance and economic growth.