Introduction

The first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) is to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere,” and the first target under this goal is that by 2030 the world should have eradicated extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day. In contrast to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), this adoption of zero targets is a common theme within the SDGs (for example, the zero hunger target). However, such targets are both highly unlikely to be met and an inefficient use of global resources.

In this chapter I discuss two sets of reasons why there is unlikely to be zero poverty, or zero hunger, by 2030. The first reasons relate to measurement problems with zero targets; despite being attractive rallying cries for activists, they create difficulty for the statistical measurement of human progress. The targets relate to the lower tail of distributions so statistics on living standards have to reliably measure not just means and totals but also variances. The main source of empirical data for monitoring progress is household surveys, which developed primarily to provide mean weights for consumer price indexes and later to aid in calculation of national accounts. Common designs used for those tasks overstate variances and mix together chronic and transient welfare components. Consequently, it will be difficult to detect the achievement of zero poverty or zero hunger with the existing approach to surveys. Moreover, as countries escape from mass poverty, the remaining poverty becomes more sensitive to inequality, and the design of household surveys is increasingly ill-suited to measuring inequality in a more affluent and more urban world.

The second set of reasons relates to qualitative differences between past and future problems. The role of one-off institutional reforms in East Asia whose effects are unlikely to be replicated elsewhere; the characteristics of rice as an ideal food for the poor, which gives East Asia another advantage in poverty reduction makes poverty reduction elsewhere more challenging, and the fact that as countries escape from mass poverty the nature of poverty changes, with the poor becoming less like the majority in terms of location, ethnicity, caste, or religion. Each of these factors is likely to make poverty reduction going forward much harder than it was for the two decades from 1990.