GRAPHITTI NEWS gathers
that the world risks having to spend about US$250 billion just to monitor U.N.
development targets for 2030, diverting cash from goals such as ending poverty
or protecting the environment according to a study published on Wednesday.
Reuters says the report indicated
that governments should sharply cut a current draft list of targets for 2030
from a current 169 to avoid over-spending on compiling statistics. A World Bank
official contested the study, calling the cost estimates too high.
World leaders are due to
set new sustainable development objectives, such as improving health and
ensuring access to energy, when current U.N. Millennium goals for reducing
hunger and poverty expire in 2015.
The report by Morten
Jerven, a development expert at Simon Fraser University in Canada, estimated
that each new target would cost US$1.5 billion if it were tracked via censuses
and surveys of households, living standards and health.
That would mean a total US$254
billion for all 169, or about twice the amount of annual aid donations by
developed nations worldwide, he wrote. Many developing nations, especially in sub-Saharan
Africa, need aid to help improve data collection.
"If you are serious
about monitoring development ... you need to narrow the list" of targets,
Jerven told Reuters of his study for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which
seeks to put a price on challenges from fighting malaria to climate change.
The study said that data
collection costs are high, even with the help of the Internet and modern
technology. The United States spent US$13 billion on its latest census in 2010,
according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
NIGERIAN BOOM
Reliable data is vital to
gauge development needs, he said. In April, for instance, Nigeria abruptly
overtook South Africa as Africa's largest economy after a revision of
statistics almost doubled its gross domestic product.
Gabriel Demombynes, a
senior World Bank official, said Jerven's estimate of US$1.5 billion per target
over-estimated future needs, noting that the United Nations in 2013 urged a
"data revolution" to harness new technologies.
And he said national statistics
agencies of many middle income nations were more advanced than Jerven
estimated.
"The cost to
international aid donors of filling remaining survey gaps is manageable - on
the order of US$300 million per year," he and a colleague wrote in a
commentary for the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Suggested U.N. goals for
2030 include eradicating poverty, with targets to end the worst poverty of
below US$1.25 a day, and to reduce by at least half the proportion of people
living in any form of poverty.
Bjorn Lomborg, director
of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, said the United Nations should limit
targets or risk diverting money from spending on health or fresh water
supplies.
"This is a wake-up
call to avoid costly demands on the global system," he told Reuters of
Jerven's estimates.
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