UNITED
NATIONS  GENERAL
ASSEMBLY
INTRODUCTORY
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
OF THE
FIFTY EIGHT SESSION
OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY
AT
THE HIGH-LEVEL DIALOGUE ON FINANCING FOR DEVELOPMENT
INFORMAL INTERACTIVE PLENARY
30 OCTOBER 2003
Afternoon
Session
Our
focus this afternoon is on increasing international financial
and technical cooperation for development (foreign aid for
short), external debt, and a range of systemic issues, including
strengthening the contribution of the United Nations itself
in what was presciently called "Staying engaged."
•
I will begin with official development assistance. Serious
consideration should be given to proposals to advance the
near-term flow of aid, as the medium-term target dates,
which some Governments in this room have set for themselves
for increasing aid flows, such as 2006, are rapidly approaching.
We already need more aid than has been pledged for delivery
by 2006 and we will certainly need very considerable assistance
after 2006 and up to 2015, the target year for the Millennium
Development Goals, and even beyond. We have seen improvements
in the management of aid at source and destination countries
and we have begun to see a pragmatic willingness of donors
to welcome the aid recipient view into the peer assessments
of donor programmes. How can we strengthen such donor/recipient
partnerships to make the aid process more effective? How
can we convince donor legislators that aid is a good and
improving investment to which they should contribute all
that is possible?
•
We need to confront the situation that heavily indebted
poor countries face after they exit from their internationally
supported debt-restructuring process. Post-relief poor countries
still have highly fragile economies and are generally not
equipped to weather many economic shocks. It has been suggested
that assistance for such countries be essentially in the
form of grants instead of loans, even concessional ones.
In this light, does the international community's debt relief
process need further strengthening and if so how? What are
the implications of the very limited debt-servicing capacity
of post-"HIPCs" for the next replenishment of
the International Development Association, the concessional
lending arm of the World Bank, and similarly for the regional
banks?
•
Can the United Nations, with its open and multi-stakeholder
possibilities, such as were successfully used to design
the Monterrey Consensus, also be useful in consideration
of debt policies? The specific question is whether an informal
"study group" might be formed under the Financing
for Development umbrella to seek innovative proposals and
discover in which ones interest might grow to a point of
political consensus, on and appropriate international debt
work-out mechanism.
•
It is also proposed that the United Nations should be a
more effective forum for discussion of international tax
matters and that this could be accomplished by upgrading
the existing UN Ad Hoc Group of Experts on International
Cooperation in Tax Matters. Members of this group serve
in their personal capacity and the proposal is that the
members of an upgraded group should serve as governmental
experts or that the existing group be converted into a new
commission under the Economic and Social Council. What is
our view on this proposal? Is this addressing a gap in the
international financial architecture that the United Nations
can help fill? Should we look into this proposal more intently?
•
Finally, I want to draw your attention to the fact that
we as the United Nations General Assembly must act on a
number of proposals, including some of those in the Secretary-General's
report. The ones to which I have already referred would
affect the future work of the United Nations. In addition,
we will have to plan more precisely and more effectively
how to carry out the future work on Financing for Development.
How do we ensure that we can "stay engaged" at
the intergovernmental level in the periods between the biennial
High-Level Dialogues and the annual ECOSOC/Bretton Woods/WTO
meetings? Should we set up a special committee to look into
that? Some proposals in this regard have been made to make
the process work more effectively. We must respond to these
proposals. If we reject them, we must have others to replace
them. We must have a more effective process, one that can
maintain the momentum of Monterrey and hold the confidence
of all our partners in the process.
All
in all, excellencies and ladies and gentlemen, I believe
there is a widely felt imperative for more effective, coherent
and democratic global economic governance. As we heard in
the hearings with civil society the day before yesterday,
this is clearly linked with the arrangements we put in place
to keep alive and "stay engaged" in the Financing
for Development process. At some point later this afternoon,
I will give the floor to Mr. Roberto Bis-sio,
Director of the In-sti-tu-to del Ter-cer Mun-do,
to give us a brief report about the hearings.
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