MDG Progress Index 2011: The Good (Country Progress), the Bad (Slippage), and the Ugly (Fickle Data)

Last year, as international attention focused on the Millennium Development Goals, the international community committed to redouble efforts toward achieving the highly ambitious MDG targets by the 2015 deadline. CGD’s MDG Progress Index showed how countries were doing. Now, with new data for 2009 and 2010, the Index has been updated.

This note explains the methodology of the MDG Progress Index and shows some of the trends emerging. For one, low-income countries’ progress has improved modestly while middle-income progress has shown little change. Also, deficiencies in the data (missing data, revisions, and retractions) continue to make tracking progress on the MDGs difficult and highly sensitive to fickle information. Read more below.