A Measure of Hope

[groovedaddy]

THANKS to the copper boom, Zambia’s economy at last is growing. Last year, per capita gross domestic product rose by around 4 percent. The capital is busy with new construction, and traffic between here and the copper belt is so heavy, travel time has doubled to eight hours.

Still, Zambia is diverging from the rest of mankind. Its tax system has until last month been so lenient that most of the new copper profits have gone to the foreign companies that now own the mines. And the political and economic collapse of neighboring Zimbabwe has meant a loss of trade.

Zambians remain in the “bottom billion” of the earth’s poorest people — those whom Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, declared would be the focus of development efforts for 2008. If the U.N., whose General Assembly convenes today, really rises to this challenge, how can it help the countries in the bottom billion? Presumably by more vigorous pursuit of its Millennium Development Goals, whose shaky progress toward ending poverty by 2015 is now subject to mid-term review.

The Millennium Development Goals have been a major improvement on the unfocused agenda for poverty that preceded them, but the world has changed radically since they were announced in 2000. And the assumptions on which they are based need to be rethought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22collier.html?th&emc=th

[Naturyl]

1. I'm glad to hear progress is being made.

But we need some progress here at home as well.

Studies have shown that relative poverty is nearly as psychologically debilitating as absolute poverty.

And inequality kills: http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/033006Edney.shtml

[bobbolink]

2. Thank you, Naturyl! It's so much easier to care about poor folk "over there"