The Millennium Declaration — signed by 189 member-states of the United Nations in 2000 — is certainly being taken seriously by that body. Soon after the signing, eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were identified, and they included 18 specific targets and 48 indicators. (Another four targets and indicators were added five years later.) Also, an independent advisory body—the Millennium Project — was formed (headed by Jeff Sachs) to develop a concrete action plan for achieving the MDGs. Since then, a number of reports monitoring the progress in achieving the targets by 2015 at the regional, national, and sub-national levels have been made.
The kicker here — the ultimate indication of the seriousness with which the Declaration has been taken — is that an international conference was convened in 2002 in Mexico (attended by national and international “big guns”) to talk about how the implementation of MDGs was to be financed. The outcome was the “Monterrey Consensus” which has since been used as a major reference point for international development cooperation.
Given all these, a logical question would be: What is the impact, what is the effect of achieving the MDG goals as far as the world in general, and the Philippines in particular, is concerned?
In so far as the world is concerned, according to the Millennium Project report, achieving the MDGs would mean that 500 million people would be lifted out of extreme poverty (living below PPP [purchasing power parity] US$1 a day); more than 300 million will no longer suffer from hunger; 30 million more children will reach their fifth birthday; the lives of two million mothers will be saved; 350 million fewer people will be without safe drinking water, and 650 million fewer people will live without the benefits of basic sanitation, allowing them to lead more and more dignified lives; hundreds of millions more women and girls will go to school, have access to economic and political opportunity, and have greater security and safety.
Fantastic. And how much will all these cost? The estimates vary greatly. The lowest is $50 billion a year (presented at the Monterrey Conference). The World Bank estimates the cost of achieving Goal 1 (halving the proportion of people whose income is less than PPP US$1 a day) at $54 to $62 billion a year, and the other goals at $35 to $75 billion a year. (The two should not be aggregated, per the study, in order to avoid “double counting,” as the achievement of Goal 1 may make it easier to achieve the other goals.)
The Millennium Project’s estimates are on the order of US$121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion in 2015. Those figures are pretty hard to comprehend — but to provide orders of magnitude, the Iraq war has been estimated to cost the United States $435 million a day or $159 billion a year; the estimated US GDP in 2006 was $13.06 trillion, which means that if the United States had underwritten the entire MDG financing needs for 2006, the amount would represent less than 1 percent of its GDP (0.93 percent). In comparison, for four years, the United States spent every year roughly 1.3 percent of its GDP to finance the Marshall Plan for rebuilding post-war Europe.
In other words, the MDG is eminently “financiable,” even if the responsibility were only in the hands of one country. For the developed countries together, it is figuratively peanuts.
What are the stakes and costs for the Philippines? Adopting the methodology used by the Millennium Project, our country’s achieving its MDG targets by 2015 translates to, among others, more than 10 million people lifted out of poverty; more than two million people no longer suffering from hunger; 240,000 more children reaching their fifth birthday; the lives of 12,000 mothers saved; 6.7 million more people with access to safe drinking water. Again, the results would be fantastic, if they could be achieved.
What will it cost us to do so? Chat Manasan of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) has estimated that to achieve Goal 1 (halving poverty), the costs would total, for the nine-year period covering 2007-2015, P1.3 trillion; the cost of achieving the education, health, and water/sanitation goals would range from P2.5 trillion to P2.7 trillion. These are roughly the same as the Millennium Project cost estimates.
Can the Philippines afford it? Manasan estimates that using different cost and growth assumptions, the Philippines will have to raise anywhere from P605 billion to P1 trillion in total over the nine-year period in order to close the gap between the required and the available amounts.
Can that gap be filled? The short answer is yes. Think of it this way: On the average, that amount represents something between 1 and 1.5 percent of GDP a year. If we can increase our tax effort ratio (the amount that is collected in taxes divided by GDP) by that amount, then, there will be no problem. Is that too much too ask? Not at all, if we consider that our current tax effort ratio is about three percentage points lower than the average for ASEAN.
Then there is another study, by Rose Edillon, on meeting Goal 1. Her simulations show that indeed it can be met if: (1) the paved road density in all provinces increases to at least three times the 2001 national average by 2015; (2) if all villages have access to electricity by 2010; and (3) if the land redistribution program under CARP is fully implemented.
That’s a pretty clear roadmap. But there are none so blind as those who will not see.
