How costly is it to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty between 1990 and 2015?

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology to estimate required growth rates, investment rates, and per capita foreign aid in US dollars in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty between 1990 and 2015. It provides a methodology which gives a linkage between costs of MDG, growth, poverty, and inequality. In this study, the methodology is applied only to the head-count poverty measure but is applicable to other poverty measures. This study takes into account the distributional aspect to derive the estimates of the projected growth and investment rates required for the next 10 years from 2005 to reach the MDG poverty reduction target. This has been done through simulating different growth scenarios: anti-poor, distribution neutral, and pro-poor. The proposed methodology is applied to the 15 Sub-Saharan African countries.