The Millennium Development Goals: the pledge of world leaders to end poverty will not be met with business as usual

This article reviews the prospects for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. It argues that these goals will not be achieved by the target date of 2015 unless new action is taken by both rich and poor countries. It shows that current trends sharply contrast countries on their way to meeting the goals and those in a poverty trap. Crisis proportions have been reached in deterioration of life expectancy and falling incomes, but also in a wide range of other indicators in countries such as Zambia as well as Nepal. The origins of this crisis are not just poor governance or poor macroeconomic policies, but rather the difficulties of competing in global markets. A priority for these countries is to invest in basic education and health, infrastructure, agriculture and manufacturing. Rich countries have fallen seriously behind in living up to their promises to increase aid, debt relief and access to their markets for exports from developing countries-with the welcome but still inadequate increase in aid to reach the 0.7 per cent GDP target, with the collapse of trade talks at Cancun, slow implementation of HIPC, and slow progress in implementation of TRIPS provision for access to technology. Business as usual will not be enough to meet the goals and new action is urgently needed to achieve the goals. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.