Global Poverty Drops Sharply, with China Making Big Strides, UN Report Says (The New York Times)

From Article:

Experts said the most important contribution made by the Millennium Development Goals was establishing yardsticks for measuring what countries have and have not done for their people — not just in broad­brush economic indicators but in concrete measures of well­being, like how many women die in childbirth or how many children are clinically malnourished.

“It’s a data revolution, and that’s important in and of itself,” said Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development in Washington. “It has changed the norms of what development is about.”

The findings in the report are likely to figure in contentious debates this summer over the United Nations’ next set of development goals, which world leaders are scheduled to adopt by September. A draft of those goals includes 169 targets that would require huge amounts of aid money to meet and would raise a host of tricky political issues about global trade and climate change.

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