Geography, poverty, and development policy in the new African millennium: Monitoring the Millennium Development Goals through human development.

摘要

The eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development. The eighth goal (MDG 8), aims to develop and strengthen a global partnership for development between rich and poor countries. Three main components of the latter (MDG 8) aim to accelerate the infusion of official development aid (ODA), liberalize international trade, and introduce information and communication technologies (ICT) in the hope of creating a conducive environment for the manifestation and realization of human and economic development in developing countries. Most of the MDGs have been hailed as quantifiable and time bound. Unfortunately, MDG 8, which is the ways and means goal, lacks quantifiable targets and comparable accountability. Further, the emphasis on development aid, technology, and international trade based on comparative advantage is similar to the old modernization perspective popular in 1950s and 1960s. Are the MDGs an inadvertent avenue by which to create dependency between the weak peripheral states of Africa and dominant, core countries, and their multilateral institutions? I perform regression analyses with Human Development Index (HDI), a proxy for the MDGs, as my dependent variable, and international trade, official development aid, and information and communication technologies as my independent variables in order to answer the research question. The study finds a negative relationship between human development and development aid and also between human development and international trade in a sample of 32 African countries and the preponderance of evidence suggests that there is a dependency relationship between the two sets of variables. On the other hand, a positive relationship is found between human development and information technologies in the same sample of countries. The result for human development and information and communications technology, however, supports the liberal modernization perspective. I also subject the sampled countries to discriminant and cluster analysis classification tests using variables found significant in the bivariate regression analyses. The results of the discriminant and cluster analyses show how the countries are spatially configured on the African continent. Countries of Southern and Northern African regions have higher levels of human development, while countries in the Western, Middle, and Eastern Africa have lower levels of human development. The "new economic geography" hypothesis provides additional explanations for this spatial configuration.