Zedillo to Head U.N. Panel on Poverty

For Ernesto Zedillo, the Mexican president who was succeeded by Vicente Fox this month, the next step is poverty--helping alleviate it, that is.

Zedillo, a Yale-trained economist, will head a high-level panel on financing the needs of developing countries, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan announced Friday.

Nearly a quarter of the global population survives on less than $1 a day. At the U.N. Millennium Summit in September, world leaders pledged to cut that number in half by 2015.

Zedillo will be joined by other government and finance officials who suddenly have a little more time on their hands. These include Robert E. Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, and Jacques Delors, the former European Commission president and ex-finance minister of France. Experts from seven other countries have also been named. But if President Clinton or Vice President Al Gore is interested, there will be room, a U.N. spokesman joked.

The panel is to present recommendations by May on ways that governments and private institutions can help increase the flow of aid, investment and trade to developing countries.

Official government assistance has dropped sharply over the last decade--from 56% of all funds going to developing countries in 1990 to just 18% this year--despite the dramatic growth experienced by industrialized nations during the same period.

The U.N. asks developed nations to commit 0.7% of their gross national product to foreign aid, but only a few Scandinavian nations achieve that level. The United States, despite its prosperity, is well behind the European Union, Japan and Canada in the size of its contributions relative to its GNP. Adding to the bleak picture, Annan noted, is that the cost to poor countries of high tariffs exceeds the aid they receive.

Reducing tariffs may be among the recommendations the panel presents in advance of a special U.N. meeting on international finance and development in early 2002, scheduled to be attended by representatives of governments, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

“We cannot afford to let that meeting be another occasion where people meet and talk, adopt a communique and leave the world unchanged,” Annan said.

The other members of the panel are Manmohan Singh, former Indian finance minister; Abdulatif Hamad, a Kuwaiti who is president of the Arab Fund for Economic Development; David Bryer, the British director of the charity Oxfam; Mary Chinery-Hesse, the Ghanaian former deputy director general of the International Labor Organization; Rebeca Grynspan, the former vice president of Costa Rica; and Majid Osman, the former finance minister of Mozambique. One other representative, from Japan, has yet to be named.

Leading the panel will be a part-time job for Zedillo, who says he took on the task neither as a favor nor for the money.

“President Fox did not help me to get this job,” Zedillo said of his successor. “I hope that if he does help me get a job, it will be a paid job, because this one is volunteer.”