Regional News
The world’s poorest countries have added seven years of life expectancy since 2000.
THE NUMBERS: American rice imports from Cambodia
1975-2009: 0 tons
2010: 730 tons
1-8/2011: 1,183 tons
WHAT THEY MEAN:
The arrival of the first bags of Angkor Rice in early 2010 – shipped in 25-kilo bags stamped with the temple’s unmistakable five-tower silhouette – marked Cambodia’s first commercial rice sales in the United States since the 19690s. Over the first half of 2011, the steadily growing flow of bags has brought in more than a thousand tons of top-end organic jasmine. It is a symbol of Cambodia’s national revival, and also a tangible illustration of a much larger global success story: the revival of the “least-developed countries.”
The phrase and its acronym, ‘LDC,’ are terms of art, referring to a country on a list of 49 states kept by the United Nations since 1971. States on this list share three qualities: (1) per capita incomes of $905 or less, the equivalent of $2.50 per person per day; (2) worryingly low scores on health, nutrition, literacy, and secondary-school education; and (3) unusually vulnerability to economic upheaval and natural disasters. These conditions make the LDCs’ people not only poor – $905 per capita means $2.50 per day – but unsafe, with life expectancies12 years below the world average. LDC status is notoriously difficult to escape: only three countries have made it off the list in the 40 years since its first edition. (Two small island states, the Maldives and Cape Verde, through high-end tourism; and Botswana through careful management of income from diamond sales.) The current members include 7 Asian countries, 34 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, six Pacific island states, Haiti in the Americas and Yemen in the Middle East.
But since 2000, the LDCs’ fortunes have changed sharply and for better. Their 1990s-vintage political and economic reforms have joined friendlier rich-world policies including larger aid budgets and tariff-waiver programs, and also had the advantage of newly appearing markets in China and (to a lesser extent) India. The result has been a sustained burst of growth, with GDP growth rates rising from their 3.1 percent average in the 1990s to 5.4 percent since the millennium. This year’s figures are a bit lower but still noticeably above world averages, with especially strong performances in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Haiti, Southeast Asia, and East Timor.
The growth data reflect rising output, with the LDCs’ manufacturing production up from $20 billion in 1999 to $44 billion in 2009, and their farm production also doubling. Much of this now appears on world markets: Cambodian-grown rice and Cambodian-made bicycles; shirts made in Lesotho, Haiti, Bangladesh, Laos, and other LDCs; and birdseed grown in Ethiopia all now appear in American groceries, sports outlets, pet stores, and shopping malls. And rising national income makes LDCs fast-growing if still relatively small buyers of farm equipment, transport goods, food, and consumer products as well as suppliers; American exports to the LDCs were $2.2 billion in 2000, $4.4 billion in 2005, and are likely to hit $11 billion this year.
The production and trade figures, finally, are indicators of a turn for the better in daily LDC life. World Bank tables find low-income country malnutrition dropping by 20 percent since the 1990s, school enrollment and literacy up, and startling gains in life expectancy. Across the 49-country list, life expectancy rose by 7 years between 2000 and 2009; it is up by 8 years in low-income Asia, 7 in West Africa and the Sahel, and 8 in Haiti; up by six years in the southern African states hit hardest by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The UN officers keeping the LDC list may soon have less work to do: their most recent conference, held last May in Istanbul, concluded that 22 countries might get off the list by 2020.
ProgressiveEconomy is a project of the GlobalWorks Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) joined in the campaign to eliminate global poverty and based in Washington DC. ProgressiveEconomy promotes ideas that are pro-growth and pro-jobs, pro-poor and pro-shopper, and pro-security, and founded upon commitment to:
– American leadership for open markets and a strong
international trading system;
– An export-oriented growth strategy focused on major
trading partners and industries to restore America’s economic
health and rebuild high-quality employment;
– Reforms in the U.S. trade regime to
reduce tariffs on home goods and thus ease the cost of living
for low-income American families, help poor countries
succeed, and support America’s national security;
– Active government policies at home and abroad to improve
competitiveness, public health, education and to provide other
public goods;
– Improving the base of knowledge of Congress, the press and
other stakeholders about America’s trade system and current
issues.
For more information, visit http://www.globalworksfoundation.org/news.html
==============================================================================
Source: Global Works Foundation, Oct. 19, 2011
To view the original article, click here.
Comment here