Submitted papers: How successful were the least developed countries in attaining the Millennium Development Goals? An assessment based on a synthetic approach

The present paper used a synthetic approach to create a composite of two indices to measure countries’ progress toward attaining global development goals. The technique assesses the performance of least developed countries (LDCs) in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The results indicate that by the end of 2015, progress was uneven across indicators, with Asian countries performing better. The LDCs that performed better based on the assessment, progressed closer towards graduating from the LDC group. The synthetic, analytical approach proposed for this paper can be applied to measure countries' comparative progress towards realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).