Economics: Superstar economist Jeffrey Sachs presents in this book a blueprint for eliminating absolute poverty based on directly delivering the goods and services that the world's one billion extremely poor people - with an income of less than a dollar a day - need to escape from destitution.
His aid-focused message has a curiously old-fashioned feel to it, and is one which would have been recognized by any Irish missionary of half a century ago. It's about what Sachs calls the "big five": healthcare, education, safe water, fertilizers and other farm inputs, and physical infrastructure for energy and communications. The cost, he argues, is well within the development assistance target of 0.7 per cent of GDP to which all rich nations have given lip service, but which few have yet reached.
Why then has Sachs's book apparently irritated so many of his fellow-development specialists? Perhaps it is the solipsism of the writing style whereby the author appears centre-stage and almost as a monopolist of wisdom. We hear of his wizardry in fixing the problems of troubled economies in every continent: slaying hyperinflation in Bolivia; getting food into the shops in post-communist Poland; discovering the key to China's phenomenal industrial growth success (tax-free export zones in the style of Shannon, it seems). And at last, on a quick trip to Kenya, he has stumbled on the formula for ending world poverty. Seeming to neglect extensive parallel achievements of other scholars and policy advisers, at least comparable in their effectiveness, the style of this account may be too much for some colleagues to stomach. But such a reading is not only churlish but blinkered, failing to recognise a familiar genre: the "expert as hero" is a universal communications device these days in the popular science literature. And this world tour is packed with interesting vignettes. Put it down to enthusiasm rather than hubris.
Development specialists are also uneasy about Sachs's focus on what they see as a symptom of deeper problems. Instead of tackling only the problems of the extreme poor, a successful programme of accelerating overall economic growth would not only quickly eliminate extreme poverty in this sense, but would also ensure that the society was able progressively to converge in living standards on the advanced economies. After all, extreme poverty is all but unknown in the rich countries. This larger challenge of national economic development calls for reform of institutions, politics and policies; not simply of boreholes, roads and vaccinations. It is a challenge at once more complex and less costly in aid.
Of course Sachs is not ignorant of this perspective. But his goal is one of advocacy, and this must be why, taking his cue from such earlier efforts as the Marshall Plan and Jubilee 2000, he sticks with limited but saleable goals. Indeed, such advances as the green revolution (scientific breakthroughs on food crop productivity), the eradication of smallpox, and the control of river blindness, were each dependent on single-minded commitment to a limited goal, and not based on trying to achieve everything. Confining his immediate goal to the elimination of $1-a-day poverty must surely be a tactic that does not imply acceptance of, say, $2-a-day as an acceptable living standard.
Besides, it is hard to deny his assertion that achieving the grander reforms of development policy requires a basic level of health and nutrition as a starting point. This rings true especially in Africa, where about a third of the extremely poor live and where, in sharp contrast to Asia, both the numbers and the proportion of the population in extreme poverty have continued to rise. Scientific and technological advances make it possible to overcome Africa's uniquely unfavourable climatic and ecological conditions, but at a cost which is currently beyond the reach of these countries. Increased development assistance is the only way in which the necessary investments can be achieved in a reasonable time interval. At current levels - an average of $30 a year per person in Africa - there is too little aid to make the difference.
Drawing on calculations made for the recent UN report that he directed (www.unmillenniumproject.org) and which provides an alternative, more detailed but drier, presentation of much of the same material, Sachs arrives at an estimate of what additional sums would be needed. For the poorest countries, the increases would be sizeable: for Ethiopia, $70 per person per annum instead of $14 today. Strikingly, thanks to economic growth in recent decades, the rich countries could now easily afford to pay for this basic package of assistance.
Many readers will accept an ethical imperative for rich countries to fund such a worthwhile cause. The Republic has already committed to a growth in development aid for the next three years that, if delivered, will be just about sufficient to cover its share of the costs. Others have not; notably the US, though its share would require less than half the effort made for Marshall Aid. There are hardnosed arguments too, notably those relating to global security, and Sachs is not slow to deploy them, observing that, whereas the average American believes than 20 per cent of the US federal budget is devoted to foreign aid, the actual number is well under 1 per cent, or one-thirtieth of the military budget.
It is in this spirit of accepting the book as a work of advocacy that one can forgive Sachs's wilful neglect of the formidable implementation challenges of delivering even this basic package for getting the poorest to the bottom rung of the ladder. It simply cannot be an alternative to the wider policy, institutional and political reforms required for further sustained and sustainable development. He is probably right to say corruption is no worse in poor African countries than is to be expected at their level of average income. But that consideration does not magically dissolve the obstacles that continue to be faced in ensuring that development assistance actually goes where it is needed. A ramping-up of direct aid to the poorest on the scale he calls for will also need qualitatively new delivery mechanisms. Ultimately, the results will depend on the effectiveness of a wider development agenda; easier said than done.
The End of Poverty, By Jeffrey Sachs (with a foreword by Bono), Penguin/Allen Lane, 397pp. £20 hb, £7.99 pb
Dr Patrick Honohan's current research at the World Bank is on financial sector policy reforms for developing countries