DUSHANBE, February 24, 2009, Asia-Plus  -- Sustainable industrial development offers a ray of hope for lifting the world’s “bottom billion” – those that live on less than $1 a day – out of poverty, according to a new report released today by the United Nations.

According to UN News Center, the Industrial Development Report 2009, released in London by the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the lead author, Professor Paul Collier, University of Oxford, is about the opportunities and constraints faced by two groups of countries.

The first are the countries of the “bottom billion” trying to break into global markets for manufactured goods, and the second are the middle-income countries that are striving to move up to more sophisticated manufacturing.

The report identifies a comprehensive set of policies to help both groups break out of poverty and achieve accelerated economic growth and sustainable development through “value-creating” industrialization.

“Our report represents a major conceptual breakthrough on how to tackle global poverty through sustainable industrial development,” UNIDO Director-General Kandeh Yumkella said.

“Bottom Billion nations will be able to arrive at their own, tailor-made solutions to successfully tackle poverty building on the research findings and informative case studies highlighted in this report.”

Among the main features of the report include helping reduce global poverty by assisting the poorest countries choose the right products to manufacture for the global market, supporting their efforts to penetrate markets by improving export supply capacities and meeting international quality and safety standards, and identifying polices to accelerate industrial growth.

The report also proposes a new UN category of “least developed manufacturing countries” that could be used by the World Trade Organization with respect to trade preferences for the manufactured exports of low-income countries.

Ten case studies of “dynamic industrial locations” in developing countries are presented in the report to demonstrate that the right policies have made a significant difference in the economic development of these countries.

They show, for instance, that countries that specialized in making an individual component of a whole product, rather than the entire product, grew more rapidly. One example of this is the Chinese city of Qiaotou that built its industry on the production of buttons and now accounts for 65 per cent of the world’s production of buttons.

UNIDO added that the report shows once again that poorer countries should not rely on the export of primary commodities to bankroll their development, noting that commodity prices are subject to the volatility of global markets and that such a focus can sometimes discourage the growth of manufacturing.

We will recall that according to report on implementation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS), 53 percent of Tajikistan’s population in 2007 lived below the international poverty line.  Of them, 17 percent lived below the extreme poverty line.  The extreme poverty is defined as a family whose after-tax income is less than $1.00 per day.

Local experts say the report was prepared in 2007, when inflation processes were not progressing as fast as today, and therefore, it cannot reflect the present poverty situation in the country.  According to them, high inflation rates reported in 2008 have changed these figures upwards.

In a report released at a press conference in Dushanbe, Tajik Labor and Social Protection Minister Shukurjon Zuhurov revealed on January 22 2008 that more than half of the Tajik population lives below the international poverty line, which he defined as equal to $1.20 per day in 2007.

As it had been reported earlier, The Economist on May 22 this year reported on the most recent work by Martin Ravallion and two colleagues, World Bank researchers who first drew the global poverty line at "a dollar a day" over a decade ago.  Starting again from scratch and based on new data, the team has erased the old and announced the new international poverty line at $1.25 a day.  According to The Economist, they gathered 75 national poverty lines, ranging from Senegal''s severe $0.63 a day to Uruguay''s more generous measure of just over $9.  From this collection, they picked the 15 lowest (Nepal, Tajikistan and 13 sub-Saharan countries) and split the difference between them.  The result is a new international poverty line of $1.25 a day.