This report was commissioned by the Population Program of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in December 2004. The author was charged with analyzing the United Nations' deliberations that led to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to answer the question of why there is no specific reproductive health goal. Her report, of which this is a lightly edited version, is also ...

under-five mortality rate is the probability per 1,000 that a newborn baby will die before reaching age five, if current age-specific mortality rates be continued. under-5 mortality, a millennium development goal indicator, is a leading indicator of child health and overall development. this indicator measures child survival. it also, reflects the social, economic and environmental conditions i...

Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 6 has two HIV/AIDS commitments: to have halted and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015 and to ensure access to treatment among all those in need by 2010. Given the almost universal lack of access to HIV testing, prevention and treatment for children in high prevalence countries in 2000, the achievements of the past 15 years have been extraordinary, ...

This paper uses two classes of multidimensional indices to measure countries’ evolution towards the achievement of United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Our results suggest that improvements in the different MDGs tend to be uncorrelated among them and, on average, countries are largely offtrack in their way towards MDGs achievement. This evolution has been highly uneven across co...

At a global summit held in the year 2000, world leaders committed themselves to strive for the attainment by 2015 of a set of 8 far-reaching developmental mileposts known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Unlike previous global agreements (for example, the Alma Ata 'Health for All by the Year 2000' declaration), the MDGs were specifically tied to numerical benchmarks consisting of 21 ...