DUSHANBE, May 10, 2011, Asia-Plus  -- Tajik Prime Minister Oqil Oqilov is attending the 4th  UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries that is opened in Istanbul, Turkey on May 9 and runs through May 12, according the Prime Minister’s Secretariat.

Tajik prime minister is expected to deliver a statement at the conference today, the source said, noting that apolitical declaration and an action plan are expected to be adopted at the end of the conference in order to pave the way for a road map for activities of the next decade.

During his stay in Istanbul, Tajik prime minister is also supposed to hold a number of bilateral meetings with representatives of foreign delegations and international organizations.

Least developed country (LDC) is the name given to a country which, according to the United Nations, exhibits the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development, with the lowest Human Development Index ratings of all countries in the world. The concept of LDCs originated in the late 1960s and the first group of LDCs was listed by the UN on November 18, 1971.

A country is classified as a Least Developed Country if it meets three criteria: 1) low-income (three-year average GNI per capita of less than US $905, which must exceed $1,086 to leave the list); 2) human resource weakness (based on indicators of nutrition, health, education and adult literacy); and 3) economic vulnerability (based on instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchandise export concentration, handicap of economic smallness, and the percentage of population displaced by natural disasters).

As of January 1, 2011, the classification applies to 48 countries with a total population 950 million.

The UN General Assembly convened the First United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries in Paris in 1981 to respond to the special needs of the LDCs.  To continue the focus on the need for special measures for those countries, the General Assembly convened the Second United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries, also in Paris, in 1990. The third conference was held in Brussels in 2001.