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)