The Millennium Development Goals Indicators Dashboard is an attempt to show how the official UN Millennium Development Goals set could be used for assessing progress, or lack of progress, towards Sustainable Development. The MDG data have been compiled by the United Nations Statistics Division. Please bear in mind that such databases often do not reflect the latest state-of-the-art, especially for OECD countries. Our objective was a good country coverage, and a close match to the MDG 'Roadmap', and often accuracy had to be given a lower priority to reach this goal.
Please note that aggregation of indicators to overall indices, as presented here with the MDG Dashboard, is still controversial. The authors believe that aggregation can greatly enhance communication with non-expert audiences. However, the indices presented here are NOT endorsed by those who bear official political responsibility for the MDGs.
The rankings presented here should be taken with great caution. While the aggregate indices will often look convincing and plausible (especially for country groups - many small errors tend to compensate each other), for individual indicators there may be huge deviations from the real World.
The blame should neither be put on the Dashboard (it just makes the data more visible), nor on the statistical services who produce indicators under very difficult financial and political restraints. We hope that the MDG Dashboard will help to demonstrate the need for better co-ordination of data collection, and to advance towards a generally accepted set of core indicators for Sustainable Development.