WB director gives a recipe for poverty elimination

WB director gives a recipe for poverty elimination

JAKARTA (JP): Developing countries can extricate themselves
from the clenches of poverty through sound macroeconomic policy,
an open and competitive economy and heavy investment in human
resources, a World Bank official says.

Dennis de Tray, director of resident mission in Indonesia told
an international conference on human resource development
yesterday that this is "the recipe that multilateral institutions
have been pushing for some time."

"It is a recipe that evolved from 50 years of development
history in which experiences of countries such as Indonesia have
been a major ingredient," he told some 200 participants from 37
countries.

De Tray said that East Asia has seen the greatest progress in
poverty reduction.

Indonesia, he said, is especially noteworthy as it brought the
number of people living below the poverty line from 60 percent of
its population to 15 percent between 1970 and 1990.

The World Bank estimates that more than one billion people
live in absolute poverty, or about one in every three citizens of
the developing world. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia account
for some 700 million of the world's poor.

According to De Tray, Indonesia illustrates some key
propositions about how best to ensure long-term poverty
reduction, which include successful economic development policies
supported by its comparative advantage.

"For most low-income countries -- including Indonesia --
growth and income distribution goals will be best served by
policies that encourage the use of the most important asset that
the poor have, namely their labor," he said.

The other "lesson" to be learned about poverty alleviation is
the overwhelming importance of improving human resources for the
poor, he said.

"Indonesia gave high priority to human resource investment in
public expenditure decisions ... by spreading basic education and
health throughout the country ... achieving near-universal child
immunization and encouraging female education," he said.

In a bid to spur poverty alleviation efforts, Indonesia in
April launched the Inpres Desa Tertinggal -- a presidential aid
program for people in the poorest villages.

An observer of Indonesia, developmental economist from the
Netherlands, Dr. Y.B. De Wit, praised the program. "Nowhere in
the many countries I have visited have I encountered this sort of
intervention," he told The Jakarta Post.

The final speaker yesterday was noted Iranian scholar and
parliamentarian Dr. Moh. Javad A. Larijani, who suggested a new
paradigm for the establishment of world order which would be more
respectful of regions other than the West.

He deplored the fallacy in the current perspective which
places Western countries as the world's leaders and the United
States as the leader of the West.

"The principle of this theory is that the upcoming universal
civic society is literally the continuation of the present
prevalent trends," he said. "In other words, it sees liberal
democracy as the universal base for civil system, and sees the
market economy as the universal economic system of the world."

Westernized

Politicians who adopt such lines of thinking would
understandably start their development policy from westernization
of culture and economy in order to establish harmony with the
political system of the West. As a consequence, "They will face
difficulty in generating a novel base for their own development
policies," he said.

Instead, he suggested adopting a perspective he called
"rational identity theory" which places each country and society
as main players in the world political scene.

"Contrary to the old thinking which sees the nation states as
having fixed places in the 'solid' order, the new thinking will
see the political scene of the world more as a game in which
individual countries play," he said.

Based on the new paradigm, each country's development becomes
an integral part of it's historical identity, he said. "Therefore
there is no general theory or routine procedure to become a
'developed' society," he said.

"Development could not be imported, although foreign
investment could expedite the process if used properly in an
already authentic and indigenous process of development," he
said. (swe)