UN General Assembly
1997

international trading arrangements, those with little access to the world market, capital and new technologies find themselves becoming marginalized, away from the mainstream of the world economy. The gap between the rich and the poor is continuing to grow unabated. Several developing countries, and particularly the least developed of them, still continue to suffer from endemic poverty, which is compounded by the severe debt burden and leads to political and economic dislocation. The overall decline in official development assistance over the years has aggravated the conditions of the least developed countries. Unless the developed countries fulfil their commitment to reach the United Nations accepted target of dedicating 0.7 per cent of gross national product to official development assistance and intensify their efforts to reverse the present downward trend, hopes for the least developed countries will remain as grim as ever. The Committee for Development Planning, at its thirty-first session, held in May this year, proposed in its report that the Maldives be graduated from the least developed countries list at the time of the next review in