THE UN: Poverty in the world's least developed countries is likely to worsen with the number of people living on $1 a day expected to increase to 420 million by 2015, according to a UN report.
The Least Developed Countries Report 2002 asserts that extreme poverty has doubled during the past 30 years to 307 million.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which published the report yesterday, said because of the poverty-reducing effects of sustained economic growth, doubling real private consumption per capita could lead to a fall in poverty rates from 65 to 20 per cent.
The report supported the move away from structural adjustments which characterised anti-poverty efforts in the 1980s and 1990s in favour of poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) and claimed that structural adjustment programmes, even where they were well implemented, did not reduce the incidence of extreme poverty.
Mr Charles Gore, the main figure behind the report, said he believed the IMF and World Bank's own analyses had shown adjustments didn't work.
"I think the critical issue is that a new policy configuration has been put in place, which is PRSPs that are supposed to rectify the situation and this includes the international financial institutions trying to step back a bit and allow national ownership and policy autonomy, aid focused on PRSPs, more debt relief, more market access for the poorest countries," he said. "The question is whether this new policy configuration is going to work."
"In our view it is not going to be sufficient to enable these countries to escape the poverty trap and to realise the major opportunities, which we see exist for poverty reduction, which can occur if they can sustain economic growth," he said.
The report recognised that for some lesser developed countries the risk of delays in debt relief and aid receipt, which could be brought about by policy changes, are viewed as a greater poverty risk than sticking with adjustments or similar policies, even though this approach has proved ineffective in tackling the problem.
As a result, said Mr Gore, "the first round of these poverty-reducing strategies is producing policies that are looking very like the old ones".
The new poverty estimates will be seen as a setback to international development agencies and their goal of halving the rates of extreme poverty in lesser-developed countries between 1990 and 2015.