The United Nations' 2003 Human Development Report said that Asia is home to two-thirds of the world's poor -- defined as living on less than one dollar a day.

Report author Santosh Mehrohta said Asia's experience in the 1990s showed that focusing on boosting productivity in sectors where the poor are concentrated had a dramatic effect in lifting people out of poverty.

"East Asia managed to reduce the share of population in poverty dramatically over the 1990s by 1999, in fact it halved the share from 30 to 15 percent," he told reporters last week at the report's regional launch.

South Asia reduced its share from 45 to 37 percent, but the number of poor did not decline as it did in East Asia, the study found.

"In South Asia the pace of growth was faster in the 1990s compared to the 1980s but the pattern of growth was not pro-poor and the problem was that income inequalities in South Asia increased over the 1990s," Mehrohta said.

Meanwhile China, which was pivotal to East Asia's success, introduced economic reforms affecting the agriculture sector and small- and medium-sized enterprises, causing it to leap ahead of South Asia.

"The reason for the decline of poverty in China is that the pattern of growth has been pro-poor," Mehrohta said.

"The pace of growth matters, but the pattern of growth matters even more. International financial institutions tend to emphasise the pace of growth much more than we'd like to."

Mehrohta called on regional nations not to succumb to international pressure to rapidly liberalise their economies without careful planning.

"What not to do is to liberalise indiscriminately," he said, noting that China was slow to remove its tariff barriers and has still not fully liberalised. "One size does not fit all."

The report analyses the world's progress in meeting the millennium development goals, which arose from the Millennium Declaration endorsed by world leaders in September 2000.

The eight goals, ranging from achieving universal primary education and reducing child mortality, aim to lift millions out of poverty by 2015.

China's achievements in reducing hunger, which is one of the goals, also underlined the need to concentrate investment and policies in sectors where the poor are located, Mehrohta said.

Globally, the number of hungry fell by 20 million between 1990 and 2000.

"But that progress came only because 80 million Chinese escaped hunger. That's good news for China but bad news for the rest of the world," he said.

"In China landlessness is hardly a problem but it's a huge problem in South Asia. We advocate more land ownership, better distribution of land perhaps with market-based land reforms."

Mehrohta said rich nations should do their part in the fight against poverty by cutting greenhouse gas emissions and reducing global warming in order to stabilise weather and food growing conditions.

He said they also needed to slash government subsidies.

"The producers in poor countries cannot compete with Japanese, European and US government subsidies," he said. "Who gains from subsidies? Richer countries."

SPACE.WIRE