UN General Assembly
1990

However, the developing countries have so far been only passive actors in that process, despite the fact that their economic policies must necessarily take into account external factors that are, in many cases, basic to their own development. There is therefore an urgent need to integrate the developing countries, through an ad hoc mechanism based on consensus, into the international macro-economic decision-making process and, in particular, to introduce into comprehensive schemes for adjustment and stabilisation elements that can recast development theory and take account of goals for social progress designed to halt and reverse the spiralling and inhumane increase in dire poverty. Thirdly, as the Secretary-General stresses in his annual report to the General Assembly, at the apex of those two trends - balance and detente in the North, on the one hand, and, en the other, imbalances and growing poverty in the South - we find a Janus-like international situation that wears both the face of hope and the face of dangerous unrestraint.