So what next? The Secretary-General is hoping that 2001will be the year when people around the world will begin to feel the effects of the Millennium Declaration. Did I mention the Millennium Declaration? It was the outcome document of the Summit of last year and it reflects, in part at least, the ideas of the Millennium Report. It is also much shorter. Some of the language is a bit heavier because this was language that had to be agreed on by some 190 governments. As there are a few diplomats among the audience they will know that this is not an easy task.

cuban cigars online What's the most important idea in that Declaration? I would say it is the pledge to halve by the year 2015 the proportion of people in the world living in abject, extreme poverty which is defined as having an income of less than one dollar a day. That is currently 1.3 billion people. The world population is going to go on increasing between now and 2015, so if we halve the proportion that will mean that there will still be 800 million living in those conditions in 2015. So it does not sound a very ambitious goal, but actually it is a goal that would imply in most parts of Africa a growth rate of at least 7% a year between now and 2015. This is not what most of them have been achieving in the last ten years or so. So it is actually quite an ambitious goal.

It is not only defined in these rather crude monetary terms. It also talks about halving the proportion of people who do not have access to safe drinking water, and people who are suffering from hunger. And it talks about halting, and beginning to reverse, the spread of HIV/AIDS by the same date.† I think all these targets - and perhaps most important, as the means of getting there, is universal elementary education for boys and girls by 2015 - I think these are all aspects of the same battle. Probably one of those would not be easily achieved without the others.

How on earth is it going to be done? The resources are there. The most important resource is the talent of human beings living in developing countries. The developing countries only actually develop through the efforts of their own people. There are also resources in the form of fixed capital generated in an incredible quantity in the last few years by an almost unprecedented economic expansion in the industrial north. The question is how we mobilize those resources for development. This will be the subject of what we are not allowed to call a conference, because the US Congress thinks we have too many international conferences and it may be right (and I certainly do not think we should get the idea that the solution to every problem is simply to hold another international conference) but there will be a ìhigh level eventî, an intergovernmental meeting, in the first quarter of next year specifically on the issue of financing development. While that could be just another adoption of a series of proclamations of intent and of hope, what the Secretary-General certainly hopes is that it will be an occasion for Member-States, drawing ideas from the private sector and civil society, to find practical ways of actually mobilizing resources for development. And in the hope of encouraging that, he has appointed a high level panel chaired by President Zedillo who just stepped down as President of Mexico, and including such financial luminaries as Robert Rubin, the former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Manmohan Singh, the finance minister who presided over economic reform in India, Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission, and a few other people of that calibre. Some people criticize this, in fact one of my former colleagues of the Financial Times said "have these people done a real job?" I think in his mind a real job meant managing a port or a factory. Perhaps he has a point because actually the same point was made by Maria Cattaui, of the International Chamber of Commerce, so there must be something to it. The way she put it is "you need to have people who actually have got experience of making investment decisions--direct investmentî, because it is actually foreign direct investment which is going to make the big difference. Not so much portfolio investment, not the business of raising loans which is what bankers are good at. But still I think it is important to engage the interest of finance ministers in the industrial world. I think that this group of people will know how to get ideas from various sectors, not just the banking sector, about how that could be done.

What are the main tools that they can look at? In the first place I think it has to be private investment. It is no good supposing that government spending is going to be the main form of transfer of resources. It is private companies that can make the most difference. Of course they are investing in developing countries. The trouble is that they do so very selectively, and really it is only about ten or a dozen developing countries that get the vast majority of investment at the moment, with China taking the lion's share. Many developing countries, and especially the poorest and the smallest, tend to get left out even when they have made a great effort to create an investment-friendly climate or environment. Probably it is because they are not big enough to attract the attention of big companies. And yet, the private sector collectively could certainly benefit if these countries were opened up to investment. I think there is a role there for companies to get together and to do studies about the investment opportunities and ways in which they could kick-start the process and make some of these poorer countries more interesting from their point of view.