The worst industrial accident in the history of Bangladesh has exposed the scale of internal culture change necessary to validate the World Bank’s new goal to eliminate global poverty by 2030.
Shanta Devarajan, World Bank Chief Economist for Africa, has exposed the primitive statistical methodology on which African GDP and poverty figures rely. Interpret statements about growth and poverty reduction with a grain of salt, he advises.
Exceptional levels of remittances from migrant workers may explain an apparently sharp improvement in poverty figures in Nepal. But there is a human price to pay for this model of development.
Publication of the progress report on the UN Millennium Development Goals is the time of year to ask whether momentum for the 2015 targets is really there.
Fashionable selections of development success stories should be qualified by the reality that data collection in Africa is slow and unreliable.