Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals

As the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), pass their 2015 deadline and the international community begins to discuss the future of UN development policy, Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals brings together leading economists from both the Global North and South to provide a much needed critique of the prevailing development agenda. By examining current development efforts, goals and policies, it exposes the structurally flawed and misleading measurements of poverty and hunger on which these efforts have been based, and which have led official sources to routinely underestimate the scale of world poverty even as the global distribution of wealth becomes ever more imbalanced. Arguing that any post-2015 development agenda will be futile unless it resolves the fundamental flaws of the preceding decade, the book outlines a radically different, alternative approach to development, in which policy is informed by the insights of the Global South, and by a poverty analysis built on realistic, grassroots data. Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals represents a vital contribution to the creation of a more equitable agenda for social, economic, political and ecological justice which can point the way towards a more holistic theory and practice of development.