Just getting richer is not going to get us to the global goals

China and India's booming economies helped us reach the 2015 target of halving poverty but now countries need to focus on making real social progress

Will economic growth be the engine to get us to the 17 new global goals for sustainable development, agreed at the UN last month, by 2030? Sadly there are good reasons to think not.

Economic growth can make a fair claim to have powered the remarkable fall in extreme poverty in recent years. The flagship millennium development goal target was to halve the proportion of people living on $1.25 or less by 2015, and it looks like we'll do even better than that, with poverty forecast to fall to 12% this year, thanks largely to the long boom in big emerging economies such as China and India.

As countries get richer, each extra dollar of GDP buys less and less social progress