Reaching the Millennium Development Goals in Latin America : Preliminary Results

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been adopted by the international community as a series of development targets to be accomplished over the period 1990-2015. The MDGs are an expanded set of the original International Development Goals (IDGs), which were initially put forward by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. The present set of MDGs consists of 8 broad goals, with 18 targets and 48 indicators (see box). In this note, we assess the feasibility of reaching these goals in Latin America using SimSIP Goals, a simulator part of a broader set of tools originally designed to help Governments prepare Poverty Reduction Strategies. In order to compute future values for poverty and social indicators, the simulator takes into account projections for future GDP growth, population growth, and urbanization, and elasticities of poverty and social indicators to these variables. The elasticities for social indicators are based on regressions from world-wide panel data, while those for poverty and extreme poverty are based on data for Latin America. For non-monetary indicators, time trends are also estimated from country-level data2. The hypotheses for urbanization and population growth follow baseline scenarios from the United Nations.