Lecture Series Global Development

Tuesday, 28 October 2014, 6 p.m. c.t., Goethe University Frankfurt, Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, HZ 5

Prof. John Hammock: Poverty, the MDGs and how to move forward beyond 2015

Discussant: Prof. Lothar Brock

The international discourse on poverty has changed substantially in recent years. The Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals provided an important stimulus to the discourse, with their focus on absolute income poverty, health, education and gender issues, among other things.

However, despite the international consensus on the multidimensionality of poverty, measurement - and public perceptions - often focused in practice on income poverty. Recent improvements in data availability and methodological breakthroughs have made the development of exciting complementary new measures of multiple dimensions of poverty possible: Both the international Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and various national MPIs deserve special mention in this context. As the international community embarks on intergovernmental negotiations for a post-2015 agenda on sustainable development, including a set of goals and indicators, a vital question will be how to measure poverty - as a central overarching objective of the new agenda going beyond GDP measurements.