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The debate about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire in 2015, is moving very quickly. Weighing in on this debate, we argue that if the SDGs are to be as effective as they can realistically be, concrete responsibilities must be assigned to specific competent actors, measurement methods involved in development targets must not be allowed to be changed midway, and the tracking of progress must be left to independent experts. New development goals should aim for inequality reduction, a more comprehensive view of poverty, and, most importantly, systemic reforms of global institutions. The world will not make decent progress against poverty until the most powerful agents accept real action commitments, not only in the marginal area of development assistance, but in all their policy and institutional design decisions, at both the domestic and especially the supranational level. We end with eight examples of institutional reform goals – ranging from deterring trade barriers to mitigating the effects of lost corporate tax revenues on poor populations – that should be included in the new list.
Every day thousands of people die from poverty-related causes. Many of these deaths could be avoided if appropriate medical treatments were available to the world’s poor. Due to the current structure of the international patent regime, they are not. Since the risks and costs associated with pharmaceutical innovation are extremely high, to incentivise research, inventor firms are granted a temporary monopoly over newly invented drugs. While allowing firms to make up for the costs of research, this has the morally perverse effect of raising the prices of pharmaceuticals to a level where they become unaffordable to the world's poor. To correct this grievous flaw, the paper proposes a concrete and realistic alternative scheme which, by rewarding medical innovators in proportion to the impact of their drugs on the global disease burden, would incentivise the production and selling of crucial drugs for the world’s poor at prices accessible to them.