The study notes that openness to foreign trade benefits the poor to the same extent that it benefits the whole economy. The economic growth that globalization brings is certainly essential, but it is not enough. A much more complex set of policies must be brought into play, which will include multilateral technical and financial assistance from global institutions, and targeted bilateral aid, to least developed countries in particular. Improved market access for the exports of developing countries is indispensable so that they can have the chance to pay their own way. Let us hope that they will benefit more fully from trade liberalization in the next round of world trade negotiations.
Nobody expects the poorer countries to prosper without help.
Poverty reduction will be greatly assisted by external support for education, health programmes and basic social services that are taken for granted in the industrialized world. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in Geneva, the case for making extra resources available can be made compellingly when those resources are to be used for social services which benefit the poor rather than for weapons or to raise the living standards of an already privileged elite. Countries that stay on the sidelines tend to languish. Cynics will say that the evidence in these and similar studies is self-serving. But leaving aside the war of figures and statistics, it is surely no more than common sense to state that the more wealth in cash and kind that is moving around the world, and the more widely it is distributed, the better for everybody.