Since these strategies typically entail attacks on workers' and agriculturalists' standards of living in various ways (for example through rising food prices and falling employment opportunities), they adversely affect the poverty situation. Social sector and anti-poverty policies are then taken up, almost as a residual, to pick up the pieces when the negative social fallout needs to be limited. Obviously, as a result, their efficacy is limited and often they do no more than salve the collective conscience of policy makers.

Unlike much of the discussion on poverty that comes out of the Bretton Woods institutions, which tends to treat the persistence of poverty as a phenomenon entirely determined by over-interventionist governments, the UNDP report also highlights the crucial role played by international forces. Two aspects are given special importance : the problem of external debt which continues to imply a net drain on the resources of the poorest and least developed countries, and the issue of trade liberalisation.

Indeed, the report deserves kudos for emphasising that the trade liberalisation which most developing countries have undergone after the Uruguay Round have not been associated with commensurate opening up by the industrial countries. As a result, even as market access remains a problem for developing country exports, their own productive sectors are threatened by imports of subsidised agricultural goods or manufactures of multinational with tremendous market power. In many developing countries, this has not simply meant deindustrialisation, it has implied a more dramatic loss of employment generation potential in all sectors, with very problematic consequences.

Another very important point is stressed in this report, that of addressing not just macroeconomic policies (which are themselves too often left out of poverty discussion) but also the broader structures within which such policies are put into place. Thus it points out that poverty alleviation programmes are flawed by their "failure to squarely address the sources of inequality - such as unequal distribution of land, the most important asset of the rural poor in many low-income developing countries." (page 10)

Even about the overused workhorse of "governance" the report has some useful things to say. It points out that socially desirable governance does not simply consist in lower or absent corruption : rather, it depends upon the level of accountability of governments, even in imposing policies upon the people; and on the people's ability to influence policies to the general advantage rather than to serve the interest of large capital or a financial elite. And it emphasises that the way to ensure such governance is not through outside monitoring, but through organisations of the poor and of people themselves.

Perhaps it is a sign of our times that this report, which is full of valuable insights and corrects many misconceptions which are constantly repeated by those in power, has been virtually ignored by national and international media. The hopeful sign, of course, is that such a report can come out of the UN system, and that itself may point the way to a more promising future.