Rediscovering The Poor

Development assistance has had many incarnations. In the immediate post-war decades it was the main weapon in the fight against the colonial legacy of poverty. But that did not entirely deliver the goods and from the first signs of the Asian Miracle in the seventies to the arrival of the Reagan-Thatcher credo in the eighties, development assistance yielded place to market-friendliness. The likes of India, which was not at the bottom of the pile, were asked to rely more on private capital flows and less on concessional assistance. This orthodoxy held sway until the Asian Miracle nearly went kaput in 1997.

Almost simultaneously a range of vaguely left-of-centre governments took over in Europe. The US, already under the Democrats, also had the same good intentions. It acknowledged the existence of the underclass and at least tried to reform and enhance programmes like medicare.

Britain under Tony Blair articulated the new global concerns with a 1997 white paper on international development which set the target of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015 and making basic health care and primary education available to all by then. This new concern for the very poor has prompted the world's major donor countries to devise a system whereby the debts of the most highly indebted poor countries, totalling about $27.5 billion, will be written off. The preliminary meetings during the run-up to the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank are being used to work out the details and secure commitments from many more than just the G7 group of rich countries.

But fascinatingly this new concern for a proper quality of life for all and help for the disadvantaged have gone hand in hand with budget surpluses. The US is already there and Britain is to join the charmed few with a