23 May 2013: The office for Independent Evaluation at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has released a study, titled “ADB’s Support for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs), which assesses the region’s progress and ADB’s contribution to meeting the MDGs, and asks whether setting goals makes a difference to development results.

The study suggests that the region should focus on the “glaring gaps in its MDG achievements: eradicating extreme poverty and making better progress on human development, especially reducing infant deaths and improving maternal health.” Another challenge for the region is the environmental degradation caused by rapid economic growth.

The study indicates that Asia and the Pacific have performed very well on reducing income poverty, although the region still accounts for two-thirds of the world’s poor, and rising inequality across the region is hampering further progress in reducing poverty. Independent Evaluation’s Director General, Vinod Thomas, reported that the study and other evidence “indicate that continuing the same pattern of growth will not be enough to stem rising inequality nor reverse environmental degradation in time—problems that in turn threaten sustained economic growth.”

On the question of whether setting goals has made a difference to development results beyond historically expected trends, country case studies for India, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Mongolia, and Papua New Guinea present examples of efforts to adjust policies and budgets based on the MDGs in which there has been better performance on several indicators. Of particular note, the study recalls that many development institutions have redirected their financial support to MDGs. However, limited resources and capacity in many countries to implement the MDGs are noted to have hampered progress, and poor data collection and data quality have hampered efforts to track MDG progress.

The study notes that approximately US$32 billion of ADB’s total sovereign financing between 2002 and 2011 was for direct MDG support, and “interventions directly supporting the MDGs were notably more successful than ADB’s overall historical average.” The study recommends that ADB should focus on countries and goals whose development progress falls furthest below a minimum standard. [ADB Press Release] [Publication: ADB’s Support for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals]