Poor Nations Not Better Off Decade Later, says UN Report

[Karmadillo]

http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=6D2E5DE5-EBEA-4112-A92F515DC1E59BED

The United Nations said many poor countries are worse off now than they were 10 years ago. The annaul U.N. Human Development Report has been released.

This year's Human Development Report tracks progress made by 175 countries on a variety of development goals, including reducing poverty, achieving universal primary education, and halting the spread of HIV-AIDS.

The report warned that while illiteracy and child mortality rates have been dramatically reduced in some of the world's most impoverished nations, 54 countries are actually poorer today than a decade ago.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/famine/story/0,12128,994506,00.html

The lost decade

The widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots was starkly revealed last night when the United Nations announced that while the United States was booming in the 1990s more than 50 countries suffered falling living standards.

The UN's annual human development report charted increasing poverty for more than a quarter of the world's countries, where a lethal combination of famine, HIV/Aids, conflict and failed economic policies have turned the clock back.

Highlighting the setbacks endured by sub-Saharan Africa and the nations that emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of the cold war, the UN called for urgent action to meet its millennium development goals for 2015. These include a halving of the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, a two-thirds drop in mortality for the under fives, universal primary education and a halving of those without access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation.

The report said the 1990s had seen a drop from 30% to 23% in the number of people globally living on less than a dollar a day, but the improvement had largely been the result of the progress in China and India, the world's two most populous countries.

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The richest 1% of the world's population (around 60 million) now receive as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the richest 25 million Americans is the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the world's poorest people. In 1820, western Europe's per capita income was three times that of Africa's; by the 1990s it was more than 13 times as high.

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[Mal]

1. Free trade will save them!

They must free up their economy! Remove all barriers to foriegn imports! That way, the US and EU can flood them with heavily subsidised product, forcing their farmers and manufacturers into poverty, and destroy their way of life.
Death will set you free! (It worked for Iraq).
This is a particular sore-point of mine, the US and EU are equally as guilty of subsidising, but at least the EU doesn't evangelise so much about how sacred Free Trade is, and how noble and righteous they are for their complete adherence and leading the world.
We in Australia, of course, are much more subtle. We use scientific quarantine barriers.

[Mika]

2. Cuba is an exception

Learn from Cuba, says World Bank
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/learn.htm

"Cuba has done a great job on education and health,” Wolfensohn told reporters at the conclusion of the annual spring meetings of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “They have done a good job, and it does not embarrass me to admit it.”

His remarks reflect a growing appreciation in the Bank for Cuba’s social record, despite recognition that Havana’s economic policies are virtually the antithesis of the “Washington Consensus”, the neo-liberal orthodoxy that has dominated the Bank’s policy advice and its controversial structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) for most of the last 20 years.

Some senior Bank officers, however, go so far as to suggest that other developing countries should take a very close look at Cuba’s performance.

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Indeed, Cuba is living proof in many ways that the Bank’s dictum that economic growth is a pre-condition for improving the lives of the poor is over-stated, if not, downright wrong. The Bank has insisted for the past decade that improving the lives of the poor was its core mission.

Article contains some of Cuba's health care and education stats ..

[AP]

If you haven't read Palast on this issue, you should

His statistics are appalling. Botwsana and Venezuela are two countries who have had decent, functioning economies, and it's because they've told the IMF/World Bank to shove their pro-Wall St, anti-Keynsian policies. Most of the rest of the world, extorted by the IMF/WB have been destroyed since the 1980s when the IMF/WB (thanks to Lawrence Summers) changed their policies and when Reagan and Thatcher took over the world

Palast says there's a professor at Johns Hopkins who has an investment fund that, basically, bets that IMF/World Bank policies will screw up the countries they invest in. When the IMF/WB go into a country, this guy bets that the economies will be ruined. His rate of return on his fund is 79%.

[AP]

3. If you haven't read Palast on this issue, you should

Hey, how'd that double post happen?