Using indicators to encourage development: lessons from the Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Declaration included a highly significant innovation – universal support by the world’s governments for a short list of development results to be achieved by a set date. As the target year of 2015 approaches, the paper compares the MDG framework that emerged from the Declaration with other ways of measuring and incentivising progress, sets out some initial hypotheses about its impact and addresses issues about its structure and coverage. This leads to proposals about how to get the best value from the MDGs over the years to 2015 and five hypotheses about how the world might approach the issue of what framework, if any, to put in place to measure and incentivise development progress after 2015.