Are countries achieving the Millennium Development Goals?

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 off-track in their way towards MDGs achievement. This evolution has been highly uneven across countries and dimensions. While population growth is negatively associated to countries’ MDGs improvement, the latter is unrelated to countries’ economic growth, therefore posing a great challenge for international development agencies and national governments who aim to promote simultaneous progress in the different MDGs.