The Committee for Development Policy (CDP) is celebrating its 50th anniversary. To highlight this important milestone the CDP Secretariat produced a commemorative video providing a brief overview of the history of the CDP. It was presented to the CDP members during their 19th Plenary session in March 2017 and released to the public.

Half a century after its launch the CDP remains at the forefront of international development thinking, providing innovative, timely and practical advice from across the disciplines.

The CDP started life as the Committee for Development Planning in the late 1960s under the chairmanship of Jan Tinbergen, who was in 1969 jointly awarded the first Riksbank prize in economics in memory of Alfred Nobel and CDP helped put into practice the idea, now widely accepted, that developed countries should contribute 0.7% of their GDP in aid to developing nations.

In 1971 the CDP created the least developed country (LDC) category, allowing these countries access to special support measures such as trade preferences, technical assistance and aid.

Renamed the Committee for Development Policy in 1998, among its main tasks have been to review the LDC category, to recommend which countries should be on the list, and to monitor graduating or graduated countries. This year the Committee will monitor Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Samoa and Vanuatu.

The disciplinary, geographical and professional background of the Committee has from the start been diverse. The 24 members work in their personal capacity, meeting every year to submit a report to ECOSOC on important contemporary issues.

The chair from 2013 onwards has been Professor Jose Antonio Ocampo, former UN Under-Secretary General of Economic and Social Affairs and former Colombian government minister.

The CDP has always been ahead of its time, addressing together the three dimensions of sustainable development – economic, social and environmental – well before they were incorporated into the 2030 agenda.