Dynamic Analysis of Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Interventions: The Ghana Case Study

An increasing number of countries are orientating their development strategies on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a broad set of development goals agreed by the United Nations (UN) in the year 2000. Developing coherent plans to achieve the MDG is complicated by the multi-disciplinary nature of the goals and by the complexity of the system being managed. To support this planning process, various approaches have been developed that facilitate the identification of the necessary interventions to achieve the MDG and their cost. The work described in this paper complements the most commonly used approaches for MDG planning by analyzing the impact of alternative interventions in an integrated socioeconomic-environmental framework. Our framework is implemented with the System Dynamics method, ideally suited to capture the elements of dynamic complexity – feedback loops in particular – that make public policy analysis in this area particularly difficult. This allows us to estimate the impact of the MDG-related interventions on the economic and demographic development of the country under study, as well as the possible positive and negative synergies between different interventions, e.g. between education and health interventions. Results indicate that failure to account for these factors can lead to sub-optimal strategies. Our objective is to provide policy-makers with a comprehensive picture of the outcomes of alternative MDG interventions, and their implications for financing.

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