Poverty is not passe, and development is not a dirty word

This article was published in The Australian 21 January 2010

Colonialism, the independence of nations and the development decades are words rarely heard nowadays.

They were commonplace around the middle of the 20th century, when the springtime of freedom for developing countries was the focus of world attention.

Future historians will describe the second half of the 20th century as the period when the majority of the world's population lifted themselves out of thousands of years of subsistence living. This development revolution surpasses both the Neolithic and industrial revolutions in magnitude and rapidity. Between 1950 and 2000, literacy rates in developing countries doubled from 33 per cent to nearly 70 per cent, and absolute poverty fell from 60 per cent to below 20 per cent. Per capita income has been doubling every 30 years since 1950. Several billion people are off the bottom rung of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where shelter and food are their only concerns.