Individual countries and regions of the world have been compared as if they began from similar premises. Little, if any, attention has been paid to the question of where a country started from and what distance it has travelled on the way to implementing the Goals (Go and Quijada, 2012; Easterly, 2007). Second, this attempt to benchmark these goals for national planning purposes without adequately contextualizing and tailoring them to national circumstances and capabilities has been criticized—even by one of the MDG architects, Jan Vandemoortele.