Women in village of Hansdehar, Haryana, India.

A T the start of what became known as the Doha

Round of multilateral trade negotiations, many

proposed it be named the Millennium Round.But that suggestion went nowhere after a wit ob-

served that this could mean it would take a millennium be-fore the negotiating nations would reach consensus to closethe Round.

This is not quite the problem with the MillenniumDevelopment Goals (MDGs; see Box 1 in "RegainingMomentum" in this issue of F&D). They are not specificcommitments by nation-states whose feet would be held tothe fire in case of "default" or shortfall-the way that, say, amultinational trade agreement creates obligations throughthe World Trade Organization (WTO). The MDGs are infact aspirational do-good targets in selected areas, often withquantitative dimensions (for example, halving the hungerrate, not just reducing it) and have defined dates-with theexhortation that all goals be met everywhere by September2015. But there are no repercussions on any nations if thegoals are not met, as seems likely in most cases.

It is not surprising then that the MDGs have been affirmedrepeatedly by consensus among all United Nations (UN)member states; one would have to be positively ghoulish-and unmindful of the fact that failure to achieve carries nopenalties-to abstain or object. But this does not mean thatwhen UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed the MDGtargets, based on the Millennium Report drafted by AssistantSecretary-General John Ruggie's team, there were no objec-tions from nations opposed to specific MDGs. For example,South Africa did not initially wish to have a reference madeto HIV/AIDS. And when multilateral agencies like the World

Bank began recording progress toward the MDGs, presum-ably with implications for aid flows, representatives of coun-tries like India did start recording objections to certain MDGtargets. Still, there are some skeptical and even hostile ques-tions that must be asked and answered if we are to assess theMDG initiative meaningfully on its 10th anniversary.

Setting priorities

From the outset, critics of the MDGs have asked, why thesespecific MDGs and not other, possibly more desirable, tar-gets? For example, many activists have been particularly con-cerned that the gender-related targets addressed by MDGs3 and 5 (on gender equality and maternal health) excludeissues such as the trafficking of women. And scholars andactivists concerned with gender issues deplore the fact thatgender pay equality is not specifically mentioned. Althoughthe MDGs suggest comprehensiveness, especially when thesubgroups of "indicators for monitoring progress" are spelledout, they are in fact selective. And it is regrettable that theUN officials in charge of the MDGs have not explained whythe chosen MDGs are more socially desirable than those thatwere excluded, or examined whether they ought to be reset Itappears that once the MDGs were chosen alongside the asso-ciated indicators, attention shifted to overseeing and evensteering progress toward them. As a result, even the chosenMDGs have not been systematically examined in terms ofsocial cost-benefit analysis, including trade-offs among thedifferent MDGs-which we must confront if all MDGs can-not be achieved simultaneously.

As it happens, even within individual MDGs, there aremany ways to achieve the targets. For example, the indica-

14 Finance & Development September 2010

tors for MDG 3 on gender equality and empowering womenlists the "proportion of seats held by women in nationalparliament." Yet women's effective representation in localgovernance (such as what Indians call "village panchayats")is likely to be far more important than that in national gov-ernment, if we go by several recent scholarly studies on, forexample, the impact of public goods expenditure decisionswhen women are put on these panchayats in the state ofWest Bengal (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004). And MDG7 on ensuring environmental sustainability lists a number ofindicators-yet as the lack of agreement at the global envi-ronmental summit in Copenhagen revealed last year, the goalfaces many resource constraints.

In fact, there should be far more analysis of the rankingof all MDG targets so that meaningful choices can be madeamong them when everything cannot be accomplished. Onedramatic exercise of this kind has come, not from the MDGbureaucrats, but from the iconoclastic Bjorn Lomborg of theCopenhagen Consensus Center. Over the years, he has puttogether a small group of world-class economists to assessnumerous scientific and economic studies that he commis-sioned on alternative developmental targets, including lastyear's exercise on spending an Environmental Superfund onalternative forms of mitigation and adjustment. The work ofthis group is an example of what needs to be done for eachspecific MDG instead of the cheerleading for the MDGsin general that emanates for the most part from the UnitedNations Development Programme (UNDP).

Hitting the right targets

At the same time, the use of uniform MDG targets for allcountries is inappropriate. A substantial reduction of extreme

Skilled manpower bottleneck

Just as success follows from a constellation of good policies, fail-ure generally results from a multitude of unfavorable factors. Yet,one can usually zero in on certain critical missing elements thatcan cripple a developmental effort In Africa, an overriding prob-lem is the lack of skilled manpower.

For example, the fight against HIV/AIDS has been hamperedby shortages of doctors, nurses, and community workers inmany African countries, and the distribution of aid relief dur-ing famines and pestilence has often required an influx of for-eign skilled personnel.

But African nationals, whether trained at home or abroad,migrate in great numbers. For example, almost 90 percent ofGhanaian doctors work abroad. It is tempting to say, as manyNGOs suggest, that the rich countries should not allow theemployment of doctors and other professionals from the poorcountries of Africa: "stop the brain drain" is the refrain. But,aside from the fact that emigration restrictions are unacceptabletoday on human rights grounds, professionals forced to remain athome are unlikely to function efficiently.

Understanding these issues, the economists working on the"brain drain" issue in the 1950s and 1960s, when nationals fromcountries like India began to migrate abroad, shifted to thediaspora model. The objective became to maximize the benefit

poverty from its 1990 levels (MDG 1 is to halve the povertyrate between 1990 and 2015) is something that India almostcertainly achieved even before the start of the MDGs 10 yearsago, because of the enhanced growth rates of income result-ing from "liberal" reforms that started in earnest in India in1991 and helped pull nearly 200 million people above thepoverty line. By contrast, the MDG target for poverty reduc-tion is too optimistic for several African countries that havebeen handicapped by acutely bad governance for a variety ofreasons. Assigning the same target to both, and then compli-menting the former and condemning the latter, is not merelybad economics; it is also unhelpful.

In the same vein, it makes little sense to tell Thailand,where child prostitution and trafficking are serious prob-lems, that the government and nongovernmental organiza-tions (NGOs) should focus on women's participation in thenational parliament to the same degree as in India, whereprostitution and trafficking are not nearly as serious.

Moreover, the MDGs are not always relevant targets: some-times an MDG target can be fulfilled without any substantialimprovement in the reality the MDG seeks to improve. Forexample, MDG 2 specifies universal primary education as atarget. But one can get all children to go to school withoutsignificantly improving their ability to read and write, letalone do arithmetic. In India, teacher absenteeism has under-mined the effect of increased school enrollment: childrenlearn little even when they attend primary school because theteachers do not turn up.

Targets versus instruments

A more serious problem with the MDG approach, however,is that the central task in development is not the specification

from the diaspora, through programs to encourage short-termspells in home countries, incentives for remittances, and tax-ing citizens abroad-now known as the Bhagwati tax, like theTobin tax on capital flows (Bhagwati and Hanson, 2009). Thesemeasures could be balanced by offering political benefits suchas the right to vote.

The fact that developing countries can benefit from profes-sionals working abroad means rich countries should keep theirdoors open to skilled immigrants from Africa. They should alsostep up training of Africans with vastly augmented scholarshipsand dismantle misguided roadblocks to Africans staying on inthose rich countries. The diaspora would increase dramatically asa result, as would benefits to the source countries. In fact, there isno realistic alternative. If past experience is a guide, the diasporawill return once the African countries take off, just as Indianshave now begun to return to India in great numbers.

The question remains: how can a country fill the need for skilledmanpower until this happens? One suggestion is for the rich coun-tries, many of which face the demographics of an aging popula-tion, to organize a Gray Peace Corps-much like the traditionalU.S. Peace Corps. This corps would allow retired doctors, scien-tists, engineers, and businesspeople, among others, put their skillsto good use in organized programs in African countries such asBotswana and Ghana.

Finance & Development September 2010 I5

of desirable targets (put into context for different countriesbased on their historical, cultural, and political circum-stance) but rather the specification of policy instrumentsthat achieve these targets. Confusion over this critical dis-tinction between targets and instruments becomes apparentwhen one contrasts the first seven MDGs, which are indeedtargets, with MDG 8: "Develop a global partnership fordevelopment: Partnership is of course better than discord,but that does not turn it into a development goal. MDG 8exhorts the private sector to advance information technol-ogy and the availability of generic drugs in poor countries,but it also advocates freer trade and increased aid (includ-ing debt relief).

The problem with including these instruments as targetsis that the MDG exercise has as a result drawn criticism,not just regarding the choice of goals but also regarding theapparent embrace of policies that some activist groups iden-tify with corporate interests, neoliberal apologetics, andthe like. For example, Patrick Bond, Director of the Centerfor Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, SouthAfrica, writes, the "MDG process, the international ven-ues for the MDGs' elaboration, and the concrete strategiesfor achieving these objectives--including privatisation ofbasic services such as water and electricity-are doing moreharm than good" (Bond, 2006; emphasis added). And PeggyAntrobus of Development Alternatives for Women in a NewEra unfairly critiques the MDGs for envisaging the state asplaying a principal role in achieving the MDGs, but she isalso clearly turned off by "neoliberalism" as the guiding lightof MDGs, a result no doubt of MDG 8. "I do not believe inMDGs. I think of them as a Major Distraction Gimmick.... To the extent that all the goals relate to the role of thestate, one must ask how feasible it is that states weakenedby the requirements of neoliberalism and whose revenues arereduced by privatization and trade liberalism can be expectedto achieve the goals and the targets of the MDGs,; she said(quoted in Bond, 2006, p. 341; emphasis added).

As a "neoliberal" who has worked for decades on severalaspects of free and multilateral trade, I am happy that theauthors of the MDGs believe that "an open, non-discrimina-tory trading system" is conducive to development. But onecannot just leave it at that. Once policy preferences are stated,opposition is inevitable and must be confronted systematically.True, credible opponents of freer trade are hard to find. Yet,it should have been possible for the UNDR where the man-agement of MDGs was lodged by Kofi Annan, to bring in thetop luminaries in the field of international trade to cut theseopponents down to size. Then again, what was the point ofembracing a "non-discriminatory" trading system, and thenpresiding indifferently over the massive proliferation of pref-erential trade agreements in the past decade (Bhagwati, 2008)?

Including foreign aid as an instrument of MDG 8 posesa different problem. Uncritical reliance on aid has under-mined the credibility of MDGs themselves. Many Africanintellectuals and economists have come to denounce it andeven to disown its proponents, which include Jeffrey Sachs,the Columbia University professor and UNDP-based adviser

to the UN on MDGs, and singer/activist Bono. We knownow that it is the policy framework that delivers results.With a bad policy framework, neither domestic nor foreignresources, including aid, will yield high returns. India did notuse aid badly, but its real growth and the resultant drop inpoverty began when aid to India had virtually ended and thecounterproductive framework of aid was replaced by the new"liberal" policy framework (disliked viscerally by Bond andAntrobus). Asserting that those who worry about the effi-cacy of aid-an issue raised by the great development econo-mist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan in the context of absorptivecapacity-are morally depraved is a lazy approach to an issueof critical importance to development in poor countries.

In addition, MDG 8 suffers from a glaring omission.Migration has become an important issue for several years.While illegal migration raises serious human rights and eco-nomic problems of its own, legal migration of skilled work-ers from poor to rich countries poses a different set of issuesand puts other MDG targets at risk, especially in Africa. Mostprofessionals in Africa either migrate or stay on after study-ing abroad: this is inevitable as African working conditions,combined with social legislation and politics, propel profes-sionals away from home. But the continent needs a skilledworkforce for virtually every problem that one can thinkof. The biggest challenge is how to supply that need untilAfrican development takes off and the diaspora begins toreturn home, as has happened with India (see box).

Time for reorganization

The 10th anniversary of the MDGs should be an occasion formember states to contemplate new leadership in managingthe goals in order to address the instruments candidly andadd key nuances. The management of the chosen MDGsunder their present leadership, which has been in place foralmost a decade, has fallen into a technocratic pursuit ofincreased demands for aid flows, and advocating programsregardless of governance constraints and local contexts-anapproach that diverts attention from the effective pursuit ofeven the chosen MDG goals. Surely we can do better. U

Jagdish Bhagwati is University Professor, Economics and Law,at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in InternationalEconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York

References:

Bhagwati. Jagdish, 2008, Termites in the Trading System: HowPreferential Trade Agreements Undermine Free Trade (New York:Oxford University Press).

- and Gordon Hanson, eds., 2009, Skilled Migration Today:

Prospects, Problems, and Policies (New York: Oxford University

Press).Bond, Patrick, 2006, "Global Governance Campaigning and MDGs: From

Top-down to Bottom-up Anti-poverty Work," Third World Quarterly,VoL 27, No. 2, pp. 339-354.

Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra, and Esther Duflo, 2004, "Women asPolicymakers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in

India," Econometrica, Vol. 72, No. 5, pp. 1409-1443.

16 Finance & Development September 2010

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