| http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3G2O4UIOC&
live=true&tagid=IXLMS1QTICC&subheading=global%20economy UN calls for reforms to aid By Alan Beattie in London and Andrew Hill in New York Published: June 28 2001 18:23GMT | Last Updated: June 29 2001 01:11GMT A blue-ribbon United Nations panel on Thursday recommended radical reforms to international aid and a new global carbon tax to fund development. The high-level panel on financing for development, chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, the former Mexican president also includes Robert Rubin, the former US treasury secretary, and Manmohan Singh, the reformist Indian finance minister during the early 1990s. In a report released on Thursday, the group called for "a global council at the highest political level", comprising selected heads of state, to address the main challenges of globalisation. It suggested an international tax organisation to monitor unfair tax competition and combat money laundering. Its proposals will form the basis of discussion for a summit on development finance to be held in Mexico next March. John Williamson, the project director, said the report was intended to "inject some ideas outside the normal range of thinking". The report backed the United Nations target for rich countries of giving 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product in aid. It also recommended that donors stop imposing their own conditions on the use of aid, and instead place all aid into a common pool which would be disbursed to individual countries according to plans drawn up before donations are made. This could lead to reductions in aid if donor countries were not prepared to take plans on trust, the panel said. "But a part of ownership is the right to make mistakes," it said. "A new relationship with Africa will never be established if donors put safety first." Mr Rubin's endorsement of the report - though he expressed reservations about the practicalities of the proposed global carbon tax - may cause some surprise among development experts, given the US's past failure to adopt the policies the report proposes. The US has relatively low levels of overseas aid and has traditionally tied some of its aid to purchases from US suppliers. Mr Rubin defended his record, saying that Congress had prevented any increase in aid as a percentage of GDP and other countries had opposed untying aid, even though the Clinton administration had tried to advance the issue. The former US treasury secretary conceded that it would be a struggle to convince the public in industrial countries that it was in their own self-interest to increase overseas development aid. "It may be very difficult politically but I think it's so much the right thing to do and so much in our self-interest, that it's a struggle worth engaging in, even if the politics is very difficult," he said. Mr Rubin also drew attention to trade liberalisation as an important tool for banishing poverty, pointing out that "there was nobody who disagreed with that on the panel". |
