Launched in 2000 in the Millennium Declaration, the Millennium Development Goals were a global compact to reduce poverty.  As world leaders meet at the United Nations this week to take stock of progress, Paul Collier’s Op-Ed in yesterday’s New York Times and a paper by a team led by François Bourguignon bring at least two aspects into sharp focus.  First, although designed to apply to the whole world, the MDGs are increasingly about Africa, the region that is most seriously off-track in reaching the 2015 goals [see graph].  It reminds me of a statement by a senior European official who was a signatory to the original Millennium Declaration:  “I thought I was signing something about African countries.”  

The Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality rates by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015 is proving to be one of the most difficult for African countries to reach.  A recent book published by some colleagues at the World Bank   points to some reasons why.  Many of the determinants of child mortality lie outside the health sector—they include water, sanitation, and malnutrition.  Yet this MDG is often seen as the province of the health sector, requiring health inputs.  At a recent launch of this book, I asked why, since we have known for a long time that these environmental factors affect child mortality, has it been so difficult to make

Your first reaction to the title of this post may be: “Just when, for the first time in thirty years, Africa’s per capita GDP is growing (see Graph below) at the same rate as all developing countries, why are you asking whether Africa is growing too fast?”  The reason is that we would like to know whether this growth is sustainable. Two colleagues at a recent conference on this topic offered some sobering thoughts. Drawing on his work on growth volatility. Jorge Arbache showed that it was mainly the resource-rich countries that had experienced an increase in growth accelerations and a decrease in decelerations. 

In the past, policy advice on promoting trade in Africa may have overstressed the need for African countries to bring down their own trade barriers, such as import tariffs, and insufficiently emphasized the need to improve trade logistics, infrastructure, business competition, and regulation. As I mentioned in a recent interview, lowering tariffs may not help if it takes an average of four days to clear goods at the port of Mombasa, Kenya. It can take up to 21 days for a vessel to offload its cargo at Dar es Salaam port. Given the large number of landlocked countries in Africa, poor infrastructure—such as road and communications networks—could be as much a barrier as trade tariffs.

When I started my first blog on ending poverty in South Asia, my good friend Dani Rodrik, while announcing the blog , added “it does begin to feel awfully crowded in here…”. So why am I starting yet another economist’s blog?

The short answer is that I have changed jobs. I am now the chief economist of the World Bank’s Africa Region, so it would be difficult to sustain the South Asia blog (which will however continue under new leadership).