1980 and 1998, the South’s share of the global trade in high technology
products rose from 20 to 30 percent.^11
In the financial sphere, there has been a definite improvement in the
situation of developing countries. The debt problem, the cause of so
much suffering during the 1980s, is now in the process of being
resolved. Globally, the debt/gross national income ratio is on the
decline.^12 In addition, a number of severely indebted poor countries
have been able to take advantage of the favorable terms of reim-
bursement proposed by the IMF as part of the HIPC (Highly Indebted
Poor Countries) Initiative that was set up in 1999. By 2005, the debt
load of twenty-seven countries had thus been reduced by a total of
$32 billion in net present value terms.^13 The G8’s proposal to cancel
the multilateral debt of the poorest countries represents the latest
illustration of the international community’s strong willingness to
move beyond the debt crisis. What is more, the Third World has been
attracting an ever-greater number of international investors in recent
years. Between the late 1980s and 2002 the developing countries’
share of foreign direct investment rose from 18 to 25 percent of the
world total.^14 Finally, development assistance, which had gone down
during the 1990s, has once again begun to increase in the wake of the
2002 Monterrey Summit on development financing. In 2005 aid
reached the record amount of $106 billion.^15
The economic vigor of the developing countries has made it possible
to realize unprecedented progress with respect to poverty reduction.
At the end of the 1990s, one UN agency enthusiastically declared,
“income poverty has fallen faster in the past fifty years than in the
previous fifty decades.”^16 Although such an assertion is not easy to
verify, the progress achieved in recent years has indeed been impres-
sive. According to World Bank figures, the number of individuals
(^11) Richard Kozul-Wright and Paul Rayment,Globalization Reloaded: An
UNCTAD Perspective, Geneva, UNCTAD Discussion Papers, no. 167, January
12 2004, p. 9.
13 UNCTAD,Development and Globalization, p. 30.
IMF,Factsheet: Debt Relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC)
14 Initiative, Washington, DC, IMF, 2005.
15 UNCTAD,Development and Globalization, p. 32.
OECD, “Aid Flows Top USD 100 Billion in 2005” (www.oecd.org/document/
40/0,2340,en_2649_33721_36418344_1_1_1_1,00.html).
(^16) UNDP,Human Development Report 1997: Human Development to Eradicate
Poverty, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 24.
60 Left and Right in Global Politics