Foreign Economic Development: The Need and How Well It Is Being Met

Today, the need for economic development is self-evident to the millions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America who suffer from malnutrition, are ill-housed, poorly educated, and either unemployed or grossly underemployed. The ultimate objective of economic development is to raise the standard of life – the quality of life - for the mass of the people, to widen their area of choice, to open up new opportunities for human well-being. The less developed countries have two-thirds of the 3.5 billion people but receive only 12.5 percent of the world's gross national product. Life appears to be an economic treadmill with the future blighted by an excessive rate of population growth for millions of people. India provides a good illustration of the problem. With an estimated population of 525 million at mid-1968, India had 15 percent of the world's population, 2.4 percent of the world's land area, hardly 2 percent of the world's income, and an annual per capita income level of around $75.