Faster growth creates extra resources that can be spent on social and transport infrastructure, which in turn helps attract foreign capital, making the growth process self-reinforcing. The advantage that China has is its size. With a population of 1.3bn, it is a potential market no global business can ignore, and is comfortably the biggest recipient of foreign direct investment among developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa has none of China's advantages. Many of its countries are too poor to create the pool of savings necessary to finance investment, and foreign direct investment is hard to attract.
Debt relief is one way of providing poor countries with extra resources to kick-start growth.
Money saved can be recycled into spending on health and education, which are now seen as the building blocks of development. The Bank and the Fund believe that they have almost reached the end of the road with debt relief, and that the next step is for poor countries to improve the quality of their governance and liberalise their markets. Trade openness is seen as crucial if real incomes are to grow fast enough to reduce poverty levels. Poor countries should reduce their tariffs, rich countries should dismantle their protectionist regimes. The G7 is concerned that a new round of trade liberalisation talks is launched in Qatar later this year, something that is looking increasingly unlikely given divisions among the rich countries and opposition from developing countries.