Global Policy Forum

By Paul Lewis

Washington - A generation of helping the poor is in danger of stalling, the World Bank warned on Monday. Recent years have seen declining poverty, lengthening life expectancy and better health. But now it is becoming increasingly difficult to meet goals that United Nations conferences have set for 2015. "A year ago we confidently predicted that the international goals of halving poverty, cutting infant and child mortality by two-thirds and enrolling all children in primary education by the year 2015 could be met," the president of the bank, James D Wolfensohn, said in a statement. "Now these goals are at risk."

The chief economist of the bank, Joseph Stiglitz, said in introducing the report, "We must be more cautious of programs that promote growth in ways that are not sustainable or which save the economy, or at least the exchange rate, but at the cost of increased poverty, interrupted education or declining life expectancy."

The relatively gloomy view contrasts with the attitude of a sister institution of the bank, the International Monetary Fund. On Sunday, the managing director of the fund, Michel Camdessus, told a news conference that Asia and Russia had passed the worst of their troubles.

The performance of the developing nations from 1991 to 1997, when growth averaged 5.3 percent a year, "raised expectations that the goals set during this decade for 2015 might be obtained," the bank wrote. "But those expectations must now be tempered -- by the sudden slowdown of growth in 1998, to be followed almost certainly by more disappointment in 1999," the bank said.

Current forecasts suggest that only China and some other Asian countries will achieve the target set at the Copenhagen Social Summit in 1995, the bank said. The slowdown means that Indonesia is highly unlikely to reach the mark before 2017 and the Philippines not until 2025.

In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the bank calculated that the number of people who are living under the poverty line of $4 a day has grown, from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million today.

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