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The developing world has made remarkable
progress. The number of people living in extreme poverty on
less than $1 a day has fallen by about 400 million in the
last 25 years. Many more children, particularly girls, are
completing primary school. Illiteracy rates have fallen by
half in 30 years. And life expectancy is nearly 15 years
longer, on average, than it was 40 years ago. The demand for
statistics to measure progress and demonstrate the
effectiveness of development programs has stimulated growing
interest in the production and dissemination of statistics.
And not just in the traditional domains of debt,
demographics, and national accounts, but in new areas such
as biodiversity, information, communications, technology,
and measures of government and business performance. In
response World Development Indicators (WDI) has continued to
grow and change. In 1999 members of the statistical
community, recognizing that the production of sound
statistics for measuring progress is a global
responsibility, established the Partnership in Statistics
for Development in the twenty-first century (PARIS21) to
strengthen statistical capacity at all levels. In 2000 the
United Nations millennium summit called on all countries to
work toward a quantified, time-bound set of development
targets, which became the millennium development goals
(MDG). In the five years since the millennium summit, the
idea of working toward specific goals has evolved into a
general strategy of managing for development results.
Countries are reporting on progress toward the MDG and
monitoring their own results using a variety of economic and
social indicators. Bilateral and multilateral development
agencies are incorporating results into their own management
planning and evaluation systems and using new indicators to
set targets for harmonizing their joint work programs. All
of these efforts depend on statistics.
