A former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, in the second annual Commonwealth Lecture delivered in London earlier this year on the subject of globalisation, observed that this often limited the government's ability to make economic policies on behalf of the people. Globalisation has its undoubted merits as well as its obvious drawbacks, according to expert studies, including those by the Commonwealth. The challenge facing the entire international community is how to harness the positive aspects of globalisation to benefit the mass of the people everywhere, the majority of whom live in poverty, instead of enriching only those in the developed world or small elites in developing countries. Solutions are even more urgent now as the Commonwealth, s tanding at the threshold of the 21st century, has recognised that thinking on development has undergone another sea-change. A decade or more ago development simply meant economic growth.
Empirical evidence suggests that the experience was otherwise.
Since achieving independence, many developing countries have raised their living standards and brought millions of people out of the absolute poverty they had been accustomed to, states the Commonwealth Secretariat. Yet, generally speaking, the rich have got richer and the poor poorer. This is true of both nations and people. Economic growth in some parts of the developing world has been too weak to lift per capita incomes in the last two decades. The United Nations Development Programme's 1999 Human Development Report records that 60 countries have been getting steadily poorer since 1980.