ABSTRACT
The Millennium Declaration of the United Nations signed by 189 countries, including 147 heads of state, on 8 September 2000, led to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs formalize the international community’s unprecedented agreement on the development goals by 2015 with explicit numerical targets for reducing poverty in the world. The first goal of MDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, with the interim explicit target of decreasing by 2015 the extent of poverty by one half, defined as halving the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day, as compared to the same proportion in 1990. With the 1990 baseline for the head count ratio being 27.94 percent of the total, the targeted ratio of a-dollar-a-day for MDGs corresponds to 13.97 percent of the world’s population (cf. World Bank, 2004).
