Sustainable Social Development in a Period of Rapid Globalization: Challenges, Opportunities and Policy Options

Chapter 2: Poverty and Social Equity

Widespread poverty and excessive inequality remain the principal challenges in the globalization process that has been under way during the last two decades. Even as economies and Governments adjust in order to give a larger role to markets and a smaller role to the State in development, the importance of public action to deal with poverty and vulnerability has increased. It is for this reason that the World Summit for Social Development in 1995 called upon countries to reduce substantially overall poverty and to eradicate extreme poverty. These goals were re-emphasized in a time-bound and measurable framework by the United Nations as core millennium development goals. These tasks are indeed daunting in the ESCAP region, where in 1998, an estimated 800 million people, or 67 per cent of the world’s poor, were living below the international poverty line of $1 per day per capita at 1993 prices (ESCAP 2001d: 15).
This chapter maps out recent trends in poverty and inequality in the ESCAP region, in the light of the Millennium Declaration’s target of halving poverty by 2015. The first section provides a brief discussion of current approaches to understanding poverty and vulnerability. The relevant trends of the multiple dimensions of poverty and inequality are identified and discussed. The chapter limits its discussion to income and consumption poverty, and general aspects of human poverty, including gender and environment dimensions.

A. DEFINING AND MEASURING POVERTY

There is currently broad agreement that the multiple dimensions of poverty cannot be adequately explained or addressed by definitions and measurements based only on income or consumption. The income-consumption approach to poverty fails to show the human development outcomes (Sen 1983, 1990; UNDP 1997a). Moreover, gender advocates criticize the use of the household as the unit of analysis in poverty measurement, because it cannot adequately describe women’s well-being or lack thereof as a result of intrahousehold inequalities in resource distribution. As some researchers have shown, gender inequality is not necessarily correlated with household poverty (Jackson 1996). Women can be deprived in rich households, and increases in household incomes can coexist with greater inequality in terms of a woman’s well-being.

Poverty is a deprivation of essential assets and opportunities to which every human should be entitled. Everyone should have access to basic education and primary health services. Poor households have the right to sustain themselves by their labour and be reasonably rewarded and have some protection from external shocks. These rights and entitlements are understood as “endowments” that people have in any society.

Beyond income and basic services, individuals as well as societies are also poor and tend to remain so if they are not empowered to participate in making the decisions that shape their lives. Poverty is thus better measured in terms of basic education, health care, nutrition, water and sanitation, as well as income, employment and wages. In addition, the poor may not have acquired essential assets because they live in remote or resource-poor areas, or because they are vulnerable on account of age, health, living environment or occupation. They may be denied access to assets because they belong to an ethnic minority or a community considered socially inferior, or simply because they are female or have a disability. At a broader level, poverty may stem from situations where gross inequality of assets persists because of vested interests and entrenched power structures. Finally, essential assets may not be available to the poor because of a lack of political will, inadequate governance and inappropriate public policies and programmes.

The entitlements and capabilities framework of Amartya Sen (1990) provides a more useful approach to understanding poverty, as it emphasizes the whole range of means, not just income, available to achieve human capabilities. These means may include personal security and community participation as well as such indicators from the Human Development Index as literacy, longevity and access to income. Sen’s concept of well-being in the form of choice over capabilities is achieved through a combination of entitlements and endowments. Viewed in this way, poverty and deprivation are a result of entitlement failure, rather than scarcity per se. Furthermore, what is implicit in this approach is the idea of human agency to exercise choice over different combinations of capabilities.

The UNDP human poverty indices, which are built on Sen’s framework, are useful to monitor and compare experiences of human poverty over time. These indicators, together with the Gender-related Development Index, provide the basis for comparing the gendered experiences of well-being and deprivation, including within the household (Cagatay 1998). They also help in understanding the magnitude of differences in actual well-being between men and women.

Risk and vulnerability to poverty, especially in the context of rapid globalization, have received renewed attention in recent years. Vulnerability to poverty is an important dimension of poverty and deprivation, but it is also a cause of deprivation. Many individuals, households and population groups, while not currently “in poverty”, are vulnerable to events that could easily push them into poverty: a bad harvest, a lost job, an unexpected expense, an illness or an economic downturn. Vulnerability may also be seen as determined by the options available to households and individuals to make a living, the risks they face and their ability to handle such risks.
In the light of development experiences in the previous decade, in September 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit took the commitments of reducing overall poverty and eradicating extreme poverty a step further in adopting a set of time-bound and measurable targets to reduce extreme income poverty as well as some major aspects of human poverty. These include the following:

(a) Between 1990 and 2015, to halve the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger;
(b) By 2015, to ensure that children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling;
(c) To eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and to all levels of education no later than 2015;
(d) Between 1990 and 2015, to reduce the under-five child mortality rate by two thirds and the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters;
(e) To have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the prevalence of malaria and other major diseases;
(f) To halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water;
(g) By 2020, to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.

1. Poverty trends in the ESCAP region

In the ESCAP region as a whole, poverty, as measured by income/consumption standards, was declining in the 1990s (table II.1). By subregion, poverty reduction in East and South-East Asia (including China) and the Pacific was quite significant (from 27.6 per cent of the population to 15.3 per cent) in the 1990s. However, over the same period, poverty reduction was slow in South Asia (poverty rates declined from 44 per cent of the population to 40 per cent). The poverty rate rose in Central Asia (from 1.6 per cent to 5.1 per cent). The sharp reduction in the incidence of poverty in East and South-East Asia and the Pacific as a whole, as well as China in particular, has meant that the number of people classified as “income-poor” in these subregions also fell quite substantially during the 1990s. However, in South Asia, which is characterized by a large population and a high incidence of poverty, the smaller reduction in the incidence of poverty has not helped to prevent an increase in the number of income-poor. The largest number of poor people is in South Asia, particularly in India. Moreover, between 1996 and 1998, during which time East Asia was afflicted by financial crises, poverty rose marginally in the whole of East Asia and significantly in China, resulting in an increase in the number of income-poor. Currently, nearly 800 million poor people, two thirds of the world’s poor, live in the Asian and Pacific region.

The unusually large reduction in poverty in East and South-East Asia and the Pacific between 1993 and 1996 has to be qualified. The data are based on global and regional aggregates computed by the World Bank, using distributions from 265 national surveys in 83 countries, representing 88 per cent of the population of the developing world. Coverage varied geographically. Poverty estimates for individual reference years in many countries have been computed by extrapolation, using the figures on mean consumption from national accounts and assuming that the distribution had not changed since the previous or succeeding survey. This situation makes the statistics yielded by the World Bank’s exercise partially unsatisfactory, although the World Bank is the principal source of data for making international comparisons of poverty trends.

Table II.2 shows the incidence of poverty in 16 countries based on country-specific or “national” poverty lines between 1990 and 2000. It shows that poverty was declining in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Malaysia, the Republic of Korea and Viet Nam. Poverty has increased, however, in eight countries, especially in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, since 1997. Trends in the incidence of poverty, as revealed by the country-specific data, tally with the idea that during the 1990s, which were the years of rapid globalization, the advances registered in the “war against poverty” in a few countries in the Asian and Pacific region have either been weakened or partially reversed.

The first target of the development goals of the Millennium Declaration is to reduce by half, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day. This is the measure of extreme poverty and the primary indicator for reviewing the implementation of this target. The headcount index estimates the number of people below the poverty line and their proportion to the relevant total population. The difficulty with this measure is that if an already poor person becomes poorer, it makes no difference to measured poverty, that is, the headcount index is insensitive to differences in the depth of poverty. A measure that seeks to deal with this inadequacy is the “poverty gap” measure, which aggregates the poverty deficit of different segments of the poor relative to the poverty line and expresses it as a ratio of the population. The measure captures the average distance of the poor below the poverty line and provides a picture of the depth of poverty.

In observing the incidence of poverty in terms of the dollar-a-day poverty line (table II.3), the trends are more or less similar to those indicated by national poverty lines. However, it is noted that the data are limited for many countries. In the case of Indonesia and Thailand, dollar-a-day poverty increased between 1996 and 1999, but there was a reduction in 1999. In the case of Papua New Guinea, the rate of poverty reduction declined between 1990 and 1996, but began increasing thereafter. The Lao People’s Democratic Republic and the Philippines have been added to the list of countries that show a reduction in poverty. Poverty reduction was very slow in India.

What are the prospects for countries in the ESCAP region achieving the millennium development goal of halving extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015? Available data based on the poverty line of $1 per day show that Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam have already achieved the target, provided that there are no reversals in the years ahead prior to 2015. China is close to achieving the target, while Cambodia and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, although having the highest rates of poverty in the region, are making satisfactory progress towards the target. As to the other countries, there are insufficient time-series poverty estimates to draw any firm conclusions. However, it may be assumed that of the 16 countries in table II.3, several will not be able to achieve the target of halving extreme poverty by 2015.

2. Human poverty

Hunger is a cause as well as a result of poverty. By developing region in the world, there are more chronically hungry people in Asia than anywhere else, according to FAO (FAO 2001). In the ESCAP region, concentrations of the hungry poor are found in Bangladesh, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India and Mongolia. Currently, 515 million Asians are chronically undernourished, accounting for about two thirds of the world’s hungry people. Child malnutrition exacts its highest debilitating toll in the Asian and Pacific region, especially in South Asia. The millennium development goals call for a reduction in the number of hungry people by 20 million annually at the global level if the target of halving the incidence of hunger is to be achieved by 2015; 14 million of those 20 million people annually are to be from the Asian and Pacific region. But this is not happening. Anthropometrically also, over two thirds of the 174 million undernourished children under five years of age in the developing world are Asians. More than half the young children in South Asia are estimated to suffer from protein-energy malnutrition, which is about five times higher than the prevalence in the western hemisphere, at least three times higher than the prevalence in the Middle East and more than twice that of East Asia. It is currently widely accepted that malnutrition is the major cause of child mortality in developing countries as a whole. What is even more alarming is the high incidence of low-birth-weight babies in South Asia. The prevalence of low-birth-weight babies provides a good indicator of the nutritional status of mothers. Nutritionally handicapped infants and children may suffer from handicaps in brain development, thereby having serious repercussions on the intellectual potential of countries in this region.

Chronic hunger dulls intellects, thwarts productivity and leads to ill-health, keeping people and communities from realizing their potential. Hunger and micronutrient deficiencies are estimated to decrease children’s learning capacity by up to 10 per cent. For poor families, hunger-related illness adds to household costs and increases the burden of care for healthy family members. Disease has added to this burden. For example, those living with AIDS are not only unable to work on the land but they need a more nutritious diet which their families may be unable to provide.

The two recommended indicators to monitor the progress in achieving the target to reduce hunger are the prevalence of underweight children under five years of age and the proportion of the population below the minimum level of dietary energy consumption.

Available comparative time-series data on underweight children and the proportion of the total population below the minimum level of dietary energy consumption are limited. From what data are available (table II.4), the proportion of underweight children under five years old in most countries of South Asia was over 40 per cent in 1990, in Nepal it was 51 per cent and in Bangladesh and India it was over 60 per cent. South Asia also had the highest percentage of undernourished populations (27 per cent). Moreover, during the 1990s, progress in reducing undernourishment in these countries was slow, although India recorded an increase of almost 19 percentage points. In South-East Asia, the rates of undernourishment are generally lower but the rates of progress were also slow in the 1990s, except for Thailand, which achieved a 50 per cent reduction in the decade. In fact, progress in reducing undernourishment was slow in all Asian subregions in the 1990s; in the Pacific subregion the situation has worsened.

Owing to lack of data, it is difficult to predict the achievement of the millennium development goals in this respect. There are some countries, however, which have produced progress reports. The findings from Nepal show that, despite some improvements, it appears unlikely that overall food insecurity and child undernutrition will be halved by 2015 (United Nations Country Team, Nepal, 2001). Viet Nam can potentially achieve the target but not in the case of disadvantaged areas in the country’s North-Central region, Central Highlands and Northern Highlands, where malnutrition is still over 40 per cent (United Nations Country Team, Viet Nam, 2001).

B. SOCIAL EQUITY

In examining the overall effects of poverty on the more vulnerable sectors of the economies concerned, two sets of income inequality data covering two sequential periods, 1980-1994 and 1995-2000, are compared (table II.5). Of the 13 economies for which more or less comparative data are available, only in four were there slight improvements in the ratios of the richest 20 per cent to the poorest 20 per cent. In the remaining nine economies, the ratios widened by 0.3 percentage point at one end and by 8.7 percentage points at the other. The average regression among the 13 economies as a whole was 1.6 percentage points. In other words, the status of income equality among most economies appears to have deteriorated rather than improved during the last two decades.

Inequality has to be brought to the fore in the discussion on poverty reduction. The traditional thinking was that only rapid growth mattered and that changes in inequality could make only a minor difference in outcomes. However, there is now increasing recognition that high inequality within and between countries imposes obstacles to poverty reduction. Inequa­lity is a roadblock to rapid and sustained growth. Moreover, a country with a high degree of inequality requires much higher growth in order to achieve significant progress in reducing poverty.

Equity is more than the distribution of income and wealth. The distribution of productive assets is important; conventionally, it is described as physical or financial capital such as land, productive inputs, savings and credit. Equity is also about the distribution of human capital such as health and education. Income inequality reflects deeper inequalities in access to opportunities for health, education and production. Equity, therefore, is also about the creation of opportunities for development of human capital such as health, education and production. Improved access to education and better health enable poor people to contribute more fully to the growth process and to participate more equitably in the opportunities which growth creates and the benefits it offers. In short, policies which are good for equity are good for growth, and good for converting growth into poverty reduction.

The positive linkage between equity, growth and poverty reduction is clearly demonstrated in a study of the experience of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Republic of Korea, Thailand and Viet Nam in the decades from the 1970s to the 1990s (Oxfam 1997). These countries pursued policies that combined growth with equity through a three-pronged ­strategy, which contributed to their rapid progress in income and human poverty reduction. The first strand was public investment in health and education that served to raise ­productivity and extend opportunities among the poor. The second strand was policies for labour-intensive growth, with economic expansion closely correlated with the development of opportunities for employment at rising real wage levels. The third strand was redistributive rural development policies, which created opportunities for people to respond to market opportunities.

Where social inequity is wide, poverty reduction is slow and unsustainable. Thus, Malaysia succeeded in its poverty reduction efforts after 1970, when it was able to reduce inequality and raise the income share of the poorest of the poor. Until 1970, economic growth in the country was relatively strong, averaging 6 per cent annually in the 1960s, but it was accompanied by widening income inequality, with the share in national income of the poorest 20 per cent declining. Progress towards poverty reduction was slow, with about 60 per cent of the population estimated to be below the poverty line at the end of the 1960s. In 1971, the country’s “New Economic Policy” was adopted, placing equity and poverty reduction at the heart of government policy. Social programmes absorbed 60 per cent of budget spending, with a focus on smallholder producers and marginal areas. Economic growth increased, but not dramatically so. More dramatic, however, was the reduction in the incidence of poverty. Using national poverty lines, the incidence of poverty fell from 60 per cent of the population to around 18 per cent.

The case of India demonstrates the high social and economic costs associated with low levels of human development. Progress in poverty reduction in India slowed in the second half of the 1980s, with the rate of poverty reduction for rural areas falling from 5 per cent a year to 1 per cent annually at the end of that decade, according to the Oxfam report. The country stepped up economic liberalization in 1991, hoping to improve growth and poverty reduction, but the results were not positive. Growth was slower than average for the 1990s, and the incidence of rural poverty rose. This lack of success was attributed to the insufficient investment in expanding opportunities for social development. Illiteracy remained high and public health was poor; both factors served as obstacles to employment and enhancing the skills of people.

In the case of China, high growth and better results in poverty reduction were attributed to early investments in human development. China had achieved higher levels of economic growth than India; almost three decades earlier, China achieved literacy and public health levels better than those in India.

The Republic of Korea had taken the same path, achieving universal literacy by the mid-1960s. During the 1970s, the country embarked on a major drive to achieve universal enrolment, abolishing fees for primary schools, expanding the teacher-training programme and building new schools. By the mid-1980s, over 90 per cent of school-age children were in school.

Much has been written about some of these economic success stories. Less widely appreciated is the fact that the success of these countries was built upon social foundations prepared before economic growth began. Improved levels of literacy and advances in public health enabled poor people to participate in economic growth and share more equitably in its benefits. These improvements also enabled the countries to contribute to growth through improved productivity and adaptability.

Hasan (2001) has noted that in 1966 the Republic of Korea and Thailand both had a per capita GNP of under $150, not much higher than in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and India. Per capita GNP in Malaysia was only $350 at the time. By 1999, per capita income exceeded $3,000 in Malaysia and reached nearly $9,000 in the Republic of Korea and over $2,000 in Thailand. By contrast, it was at or below $600 in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. As important as macroeconomic policies have been to economic growth in the first group of countries, Hasan points out the major human capital differences between them and the South Asian countries: in 1960, literacy rates exceeded 50 per cent in Malaysia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand; those rates have since increased to 90 per cent or more in each of those countries. By contrast, literacy rates in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan were below 30 per cent in 1960 and remained in the 40-60 per cent range in 1998. Expectation of life at birth in 1960 was considerably higher in Malaysia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand than in the three largest South Asian countries. While these South Asian countries subsequently narrowed the gap somewhat, large differences still remained in 1999.

The importance of government expenditures on education and health in explaining the contrast between the two groups of countries with regard to literacy rates and expectation of life at birth was also emphasized in the Hasan (2001) report. Around 1970, when income levels among the six selected countries were not greatly different, Malaysia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand spent much more per capita on education and health than did Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Those multiples have increased over time so that at the turn of the century Malaysia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand were spending several times as much per person on education and health than were Bangladesh, India and Pakistan (table II.6).

The Hasan report further cautions that investments in human capital, while essential to economic growth, must be continuous and may take up to eight years before they begin to pay dividends in terms of national economic growth. Nonetheless, such investments are necessary in order for a country to develop economically and socially to higher levels of technology, production and knowledge. Adequate allocation of resources to the education and health sectors may thus be considered an essential component of sustainable social development.

A more positive lesson is that social interventions in the countries experiencing higher growth were not so much a case of “big” spending as good spending. These countries are not big spenders in social policy areas relative to their income. Where they scored high was in the efficiency of the spending, as measured by the human welfare outcomes over those decades. They concentrated their spending far more heavily on primary and basic secondary education and on low-cost primary health interventions of greatest benefit to the poor.

To varying extents, these countries also had high levels of equity in asset distribution, according to the Oxfam report (1997). Access to land, credit and marketing infrastructure enabled their rural poor to produce and invest their way out of poverty. In turn, redistributive reforms in these areas helped to unleash the productive potential of the poor, reinforcing a virtuous circle of high growth and a widespread sharing of its benefits. Again, a comparison was made between China and India. In the rural areas of China, where three quarters of the poor live, inadequate access to land and insecurity of tenure prevent the poor from responding to market opportunities.

Countries with highly unequal land ownership patterns have suffered on both counts of growth and poverty reduction. Taking 15 countries with the most unequal distribution of land, World Bank figures show that only 2 have sustained growth rates in excess of 2.5 per cent per year, an abysmal level of performance. Other research has also confirmed the negative impact of concentrated asset ownership for growth and poverty reduction in Latin America. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, asset distribution has been the single most significant influence on growth in the Latin American region, retarding overall performance by about 2 per cent a year. Inequality in land ownership is one form of distribution which skews the benefits of growth against the poor.

Political commitment is an additional vital element which characterized the performance of these countries. In Malaysia, the New Economic Policy was a response to the ethnic riots of the late 1960s. Poverty and the marginalization of the Malay community were perceived as a threat to national security, and poverty eradication through growth with equity was made a core element of economic policy. In Thailand, as in Malaysia, the sustained assault on poverty in the 1980s was a response to a growing recognition by the Government of the threat posed by poverty, especially in the north-eastern part of the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Republic of Korea embarked on radical land reform and public investment in part to head off similar threats posed by poverty. Governments that sought to contain poverty by protecting vested interests and failing to redistribute social and economic opportunities to the poor adequately suffered the lowest level of growth and the greatest instability.

Another important lesson from the experiences in these countries is that poverty is no barrier to rapid improvements in human development. In the 1950s, probably less than 20 per cent of the population in China and Viet Nam were literate. By 1980, the figure had climbed to about 66 per cent. Progress in the health sector was equally dramatic. By the end of the 1970s, China’s rural cooperative health system covered about 85 per cent of the population, with a clinic in almost every village. There were about 1.6 million “barefoot doctors” in place, or one for every 400 rural inhabitants. Admittedly, coverage was not uniform and the quality of service provided was limited and variable, but the availability of basic medical care, immunization and a strong emphasis on preventative practice contributed significantly to improvements in public health. Modelled on China’s system, Viet Nam’s communal health centres and village health workers covered 90 per cent of the population by the mid-1970s. Once again, services were variable in quality and often unresponsive to public need, especially the needs of women. But the incidence of killer diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus and polio fell dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s, contributing to improved life expectancy in Viet Nam.

While there are valuable lessons to learn from these countries concerning growth, equity and poverty reduction in the decades from the 1970s to the 1990s, there are also many weaknesses in social policy, as is evident from the slowdown in economic growth in East Asia since 1996 and the impact of the 1997 financial crisis. Studies suggest that structural adjustment and market-oriented reforms are resulting in greater social exclusion of poor people. Public health systems are receiving less financing than previously, leading to shortages of drugs and poorly motivated staff. Health and education systems are being liberalized; in many countries, private spending on such social services is many times higher than public spending. Moreover, cost recovery has been encouraged for government clinics, which are being financed increasingly by patient contributions and charges for pharmaceuticals. One negative result, however, is overprescribing, as clinics seek to maximize revenue; another is the exclusion of poor people, who are facing difficulties in purchasing medicine. There is clearly a marked shift towards more market-oriented systems of social sector financing, and this will erode the access of poor people to basic services, leading to a widening gap in health and education.

C. PROGRESS IN MEETING THE MELLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS ON HEALTH
AND EDUCATION

There is a clear link between poverty and education. Empirical evidence from the ESCAP region shows that there has been a decline in the incidence of poverty with rising levels of education of the heads of households. A World Bank study found that, if women received the same education as men, farm yields could rise by as much as 22 per cent (Quisumbing 1994).

The millennium development goal in this area is to ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. Two primary indicators identified to monitor the progress in achieving this target are the net enrolment ratio in primary education and the proportion of pupils starting grade 1 who reach grade 5. A secondary indicator is the literacy rate of youth, that is, those 15-24 years old.

Data on the net enrolment ratio in primary education are available for a limited number of countries (table II.7) and little information is available for the countries in South Asia. It is noted that the enrolment rates were high and rising in South-East Asia, at over 90 per cent. The rate was low in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, but rising rapidly from 61 per cent in 1991 to 72 per cent in 1996. The enrolment rates were also high in East and North-East Asia, the Pacific island economies and North and Central Asia, that is, 90 per cent or more in most countries for which data are available.

To make up for the lack of data on the net enrolment ratio in primary education, the gross enrolment data can be used as a proxy indicator (table II.7). The gross enrolment ratio counts the number of students enrolled in a level of education whether or not the student is of the official school age for that level of education. The net enrolment ratios count only the students within the official school age for that level of education.

In examining gross enrolment rates for the most recent date (table II.7), South Asian countries score around 100 per cent in most cases, except for Bangladesh, with 92 per cent, and Pakistan, with 75 per cent. However, both of these countries have improved on their rates in subsequent years. In South-East Asia, almost all countries scored above 100 per cent. Rates in East and North-East Asia, the Pacific island economies and North and Central Asia are close to 100 per cent, if not above.

What can be gauged from these figures is that for most countries in the region, the millennium development goal in this area can be achieved, if that has not yet been done. Success in achieving the target by 2015 may be improved in view of the falling fertility rates in almost all countries in the region.

Enrolment rates represent the numbers in education, not the quality of education or the achievement of a basic education that comes from primary schooling. For this reason, another primary indicator is used to monitor progress in the quality and achievement of basic education – children reaching grade 5. This indicator implies that reaching grade 5 means completion of basic education. However, time-series data in this area are limited. Where data are available, they indicate that rates are over 80 per cent in most countries (table II.7).