The Millennium Development Goals
Sachs places a great deal of emphasis on the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as a first step towards eliminating extreme poverty, which affected approximately 1.1 billion people worldwide at the time of publication. Sachs headed the United Nations Millennium Project, which worked from 2002 to 2005 to establish the organizational means to achieve the MDGs.
He also offers some specific, immediate solutions, such as increasing the availability of anti-malarial bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa, and encourages debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries. Sachs states that in order to achieve the goal of eliminating global poverty, clinical economics must be backed by greater funding; he argues that development aid must be raised from $65 billion globally as of 2002 to between $135 and $195 billion a year by 2015.
Sachs argues that the developed world can afford to raise the poorest countries out of extreme poverty; he agrees with the MDG's calculation that 0.7 percent of the combined gross national product of first-world countries would be sufficient to achieve that goal.
Read more about this topic: The End Of Poverty
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