The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the...

There are significant weaknesses in some of the traditional justifications for assuming that aid will foster development. This paper looks at what the cross-national aid effectiveness literature suggests about effective aid, first in terms of promoting income growth and then for promoting other...

This paper discusses historical and recent cross-country evidence relating income to measures of health. After a review of the literature on income and the quality of life, the paper looks at long-term historical evidence on the link between income change and health indicators. Using data on...

Growing concern that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be achieved by 2015 should not obscure the bigger picture that development progress has been occurring at unprecedented levels over the past thirty or more years. At the same time, the MDGs may perhaps create an unnecessary...