Such extreme poverty is a tragedy and an outrage. The simple answer is that developing economies need to grow faster, and the poor need to share more in the fruits of economic growth. Cancelling Third World debt, for instance, will do little to improve the lives of the poor if governments squander their resources. When 25 per cent of the population have AIDS, then trade is just a small but important part of progress. Nor will abolishing trade barriers help much if countries are at war and farmers cannot get their crops to market.
Some people scoff at the argument that trade helps the poor.
They claim that trade benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. But the evidence tells a different story. It is well-established that trade boosts economic growth. A much-quoted paper by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner of Harvard University found that developing countries with open economies grew by 4.5 per cent a year in the 1970s and 1980s, while those with closed economies grew by 0.7 per cent a year. Opponents of free trade retort that poor countries are still not catching up with rich ones, indeed that the rich are drawing further ahead.