AT a meeting
of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) hosted by Portugal and backed by the UN, it
was concluded that improved tax collection and stronger
capital markets form the critical bases for long-term financing for development
in the world's 49 LDCs.
"Despite significant efforts to mobilize domestic resources and attract
more private capital inflows, there is still a huge savings-investment gap in
most of the least developed countries," ministers and economists from the LDCs
and their development partners concluded at the meeting in Lisbon.
Despite past efforts, LDC domestic savings have stagnated at around 13
per cent of their gross domestic products (GDPs), due to the subsistence nature
of much of the economies and rates of extreme poverty which exceed 50 per cent
of the populations on average. Ministers therefore focused also on external
means of improving resource flows, including through development assistance,
private investment, innovative financing and debt relief.
Cheick Sidi Diarra, UN Special Adviser on Africa and its High
Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing
Countries and Small Island Developing States, noted that the Lisbon meeting
would lay the groundwork for an international action plan to be adopted at the
fourth UN global conference on LDCs, taking place in mid-2011 in
Istanbul.
Looking to external sources to complement domestic mobilization, the
ministers noted that foreign direct investment (FDI) had been the most rapidly
increasing resource flow to LDCs over the past decade, with the source shifting
from predominantly developed countries to developing and transition
countries.
The
meeting also called for a stronger surge in official development assistance
(ODA). Less than half of the ODA increase pledged at the previous global
conference on LDCs in Brussels in 2000 has been fulfilled.
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