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With 2015 marking the transition from
the Millennium to the Sustainable Development Goals, the
international community can celebrate many development
successes since 2000. Three key challenges stand out: the
depth of remaining poverty, the unevenness in shared
prosperity, and the persistent disparities in non-income
dimensions of development. First, the policy discourse needs
to focus more directly on the poorest among the poor. While
pockets of ultra-poverty exist around the world, Sub-Saharan
Africa is home to most of the deeply poor. To make depth a
more central element in policy formulation,
easy-to-communicate measures are needed, and this note
attempts a step in this direction with person-equivalent
measures of poverty. Second, the eradication of poverty in
all of its forms requires steady growth of the incomes of
the bottom 40 percent. Yet, economic growth, a key driver of
shared prosperity, may not be as buoyant as before the
global financial crisis. Third, unequal progress in
non-income dimensions of development requires addressing
widespread inequality of opportunity, which transmits
poverty across generations and erodes the pace and
sustainability of progress for the bottom 40. To meet these
challenges, three ingredients are core to the policy agenda:
sustaining broad-based growth, investing in human
development, and insuring the poor and vulnerable against
emerging risks.
