EDUCATION

Spending on health and education is key to reaching the Millennium Development Goals. The EC Commission’s claim that education and health will be addressed under General Budget Support (GBS) cannot be valid until mechanisms and monitoring tools are clearly put in place to ensure that resources channeled through this aid modality genuinely benefit human and social development. The EC should work towards the elimination of the IMF spending ceilings on social sectors if it wants to be credible in increasing spending on health and education via GBS. gender.

Rob Davies, South Africa’s Deputy Minister for Trade and Industry, noted for his part that the US Government is paying US$700bn to bail out its financial system and that the European central banks are doing the same, remarking that: “In this case they can find the money and apparently not for development.” The minister was referring to the falling commitments of the developed countries in regard to the developing countries. By subscribing a few years ago to the MDGs, which included a pledge to reduce world poverty by 50 per cent by 2020, the industrialised countries undertook to allocate 0.7 per cent of their GDP to development cooperation. It is a goal that few countries have met; worse still, their commitments have in fact decreased over the past two years. “This attitude”, continued Mr. Davies, “is indicative of the priorities of the present governance of the global economy”.

ACP countries themselves have stated firmly that ‘due respect must be given to the right of members of the ACP group to regulate trade in services and liberalise according to the national policy objectives’. It remains to be seen how successful they will be at retaining flexibility to regulate services in the negotiations. One study estimates conservatively that total ‘adjustment costs’ such as compensation for loss of tariff revenue, employment, production, and support for export development for ACP countries could be about €9.2bn. Even if ACP countries decide to use existing aid money for EPA adjustment costs, it might be very slow in arriving. During the last five-year cycle (2001–06), the EU promised €15bn in aid to ACP countries. By the end of the cycle, only 28 per cent of this money had been disbursed. The record for the previous cycle was even worse. For 1995–2000, a promise of €14.6m was made. Funds only started to be disbursed in the third year, and by the end of the five years only 20 per cent had been paid out.