Causal Inference and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): Assessing Whether There Was an Acceleration in MDG Development Indicators Following the MDG Declaration

Background: The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of eight goals and corresponding indicators that were agreed to following the adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration in September 2000 by leaders of 189 countries. The goals state specific objectives for the world to accomplish by measuring progress in indicators during the time period from 1990 (ten years before the declaration) to 2015. While monitoring mechanisms have reported the progress towards achieving these goals, there has been little effort to evaluate whether there was a change in the development outcomes associated with the activities initiated by the MDGs. The dearth of evaluations applied to the MDGs may be associated with the lack of a true counterfactual or the challenges with the data quality. Our analysis focused on the questions of whether there was a statistically significant acceleration or deceleration (mathematically defined as an interrupted slope or intercept) for a particular indicator and, if there was one, whether that changepoint occurred before or after 2001. Accelerations occurring in 2000 or earlier cannot be causally associated with the MDG-related activities (since the acceleration predated the declaration) while accelerations after 2000 may logically be associated with MDG-related activities. Method: We applied the standard program evaluation methodology of an interrupted time series to the country level yearly measurements of the MDG indicators as well as a set of control indicators that were not included in the set of MDG indicators (and were not likely to have been directly impacted by MDG-related activities). The modeling technique used was a multiple linear mixed model where we identified the optimal year of the changepoint in the outcome by examining years 1992 to 2008 for all datasets. Analysis was performed separately for IDA-only countries (World Bank 2000 designation) as well as for a broader set of countries consisting of IDA, IBRD and Blend countries. The IDA (International Development ...