Strengthening Governance Globally is the fifth volume in a series entitled Patterns of Potential Human Progress that explores prospects for human development and the improvement of the global human condition. Each volume considers one key aspect of how development appears to be unfolding globally, how we would like it to evolve, and how better to move it in desired directions. This volume identifies the provision of security, the building of government capacity, and the broadening and deepening of inclusion as three dimensions of governance on which high-income countries have traditionally made long, halting, and somewhat sequential historical transitions. In contrast, many developing countries today struggle with all three governance transition dimensions simultaneously and in a relative rush to broadly defined development. The volume maps and uses the growing empirical database on governance variables for understanding historical change on these dimensions and in recent decades.

This is the first volume in an ambitious new series-"Patterns of Potential Human Progress"-inspired by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) and other initiatives to improve the global condition. The first and most fundamental of these goals-reducing poverty worldwide-is the focus of this book. Using the large-scale computer program called International Futures (IFs), developed over three decades at the prestigious University of Denver Graduate School of International Studies, this book explores the most extensive set of forecasts of global poverty ever made-providing a wide range of scenarios based on an authoritative array of data. It transcends the "$1 a day" baseline measure of poverty and probes important concepts like income poverty gaps and relative poverty. The forecasts are long-term, looking 50 years into the future, far beyond the 2015 date set out by the MDGs. They are geographically rich, spanning the entire globe and drilling down to the country level, including one of the most important global focal points, India. The poverty forecasts in this book, and all the volumes in the series, are fully integrated in perspective across a wide range of human development arenas including demographics, economics, politics, agriculture, energy, and the environment. Full of colorful and thoughtfully designed graphs, tables, maps, and other visual presentations of data and forecasts, this large-format inaugural volume ensures that the "Patterns of Potential Human Progress" series will become an indispensable resource for every development professional, student, professor, library, and indeed, country around the world.

"Improving Global Health" is the third in a series of volumes Patterns of Potential Human Progress that uses the International Futures (IFs) simulation model to explore prospects for human development: how development appears to be unfolding globally and locally, how we would like it to evolve, and how better to assure that we move it in desired directions. Earlier volumes addressed the reduction of global poverty and the advance of global education. Volume 3 sets out to tell a story of possible futures for the health of peoples across the world. Questions the volume addresses include: What health outcomes might we expect given current patterns of human development? What opportunities exist for intervention and the achievement of alternate health futures? How might improved health futures affect broader economic, social, and political prospects of countries, regions, and the world?