Summary

The Copenhagen Consensus Center's initiative to sponsor “hard-nosed” assessments of the economic costs and benefits of proposed goals and targets, along with the strengths and weaknesses of data and methodologies to monitor progress, is providing welcome contributions to ongoing discussions. The chapter from John Gibson raises three questions: Do the proposed poverty targets strike the right balance between breadth, idealism, and realism? Is it appropriate to focus solely on extreme poverty ($1.25 a day)? and Are data and monitoring methodologies sufficiently robust and wellspecified to carry the debate forward?

The proposed post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals are a broader and more ambitious set of development goals than the previous MDGs. The call to eradicate poverty “in all its forms everywhere” is very ambitious. None but the most idealistic believe that this goal – or the other SDG zero-goals – are possible to achieve. Gibson points out some of the underlying features of rapid poverty reduction in the past that are not likely to carry forward into the future. There is one important additional factor that may slow the pace of future poverty reduction: as policies and programs become more narrowly targeted and concentrate on groups that have been socially excluded or are discriminated against, they may not have widespread political support.

Although the proposed targets have been criticized as being too ambitious, others argue that the $1.25 a day poverty line is not ambitious enough and has no relevance for middle- and upperincome countries. By this reckoning, a set of (higher-order) goals is needed that better capture the rising aspirations that all countries have for the well-being of their citizens. We take the view that “stretch” goals have an essential role in post-2015 SDG discussions. Reducing global poverty, as defined using a truly global standard that reflects standards that apply in all countries, would be an additional such goal to put alongside the proposed zero target for extreme poverty. Taking out the billion people in extreme poverty, and the billion who are prosperous by global standards, leaves five billion who are poor by standards of rich countries but not poor by the standards of the very poorest countries.