Poverty: What's the smartest SDG target?

Despite great progress over the last 20 years, just over 1 billion continue to live in extreme poverty. Much discussion in the post-2015 agenda revolves around addressing this ongoing problem and it is unsurprising that numerous poverty targets have been proposed – from more social inclusion, to full employment, more happiness, increased resilience and more.
 
But which one of these targets is best? 

As reported in Huffington Post, the best approach is a simple one: let’s continue focusing on reducing extreme poverty and de-prioritize the rest. 

It will not come without challenges – we know surprisingly little about poverty because of poor data, the remaining poor in non-poor countries are often marginalized groups and some of the catalysts for dramatic poverty reduction in Asia cannot be replicated in currently poor regions in Africa. But the academic analysis shows that a straight-forward focus on poverty can for each dollar spent do $5 worth of good in poverty alleviation.
 
Previously in this project we have also found that a focus on free trade through a successful Doha Round can lift 160 million out of poverty by 2030. For each dollar spent, it can do about $2,000 of good.

Focusing on social protection systems and full employment may lead to unintended distortions in job markets that actually hurt the poor and vulnerable. Targeting increased resilience from natural disasters risks over-focusing on one of the myriad of problems facing the poor. Finally, happiness indicators, while intuitively appealing, are difficult to compare across time and between different groups of people.

You can read all the papers on poverty here and download the one page PDF here.