November 12, 2013
The global goal of eliminating “extreme poverty” will have been supplanted by country-specific goals – to reduce poverty below country-specific poverty lines and to increase median wages and incomes. Across countries, the media and the international community will use median income (or consumption) as an indicator of typical well-being and of a country’s general state of development progress.
What we know today as ODA will have been largely replaced by two non-aid sources of financing from high-income to developing countries: non-concessional loans from development banks (multilateral and national) for development investments focused on growth and job creation; and transfers from high-income to developing countries in support of such global public goods as reducing deforestation and managing non-state terrorism and crime.
These two changes assume a world in which market-led growth will have reduced absolute poverty in the developing world to close to zero but the broader goals of development—and prosperous and secure societies everywhere—face greatly increased risks due to climate change, non-state terrorism, such global bads as new pandemics and collapse into conflict in parts of the world, and the tensions created by stark inequalities in ever-more interconnected global markets.