Dominican Republic, 2012

We

warmly congratulate Mr. Vuk Jeremić on his election

to the presidency of the General Assembly at its sixty-

seventh session.

We are also pleased that the general debate of this

session is devoted to considering, among other issues,

the promotion of sustained economic growth and

sustainable development in accordance with relevant

General Assembly resolutions and recent United

Nations conferences.

Since we adopted the Declaration that led to the

Millenium Development Goals (resolution 55/2), the

image of development has been tied to the reduction

of poverty and to the development of capacities and

opportunities for the most vulnerable populations.

The majority of our developing countries had made

significant progress in this area until 2008, when the

financial crisis, which affected the world economy and

threatened to cancel out our achievements, began.

We are living at a time of multiple simultaneous

crises. The ecological crisis threatens the majority of

our f lora and fauna. Global warming threatens coastal

populations and small island countries. Unchecked

population growth threatens to exceed the capacity of

nature to restore itself. We have witnessed a crisis of the

values that have traditionally governed the behaviour of

humankind. War and armed conflict threaten the right

to cultural, ideological and political diversity and our

right to live in peace and unity.

Those of us who live in the developing countries

did not cause the world financial crisis. As you know,

the crisis was caused by the failure to use effective

regulations in the international financial system and

by the arrogance, greed and unbridled desire to amass

wealth. In the context of the crisis, age-old debates

have resurfaced as to how best to tackle the crisis.

Should we reduce investment in social protections for

our populations? Or, on the contrary, should we bolster

investment, making anti-cyclical social investment policies into a springboard for reviving economies?

And how do we measure poverty and development and

recognize the social impact of the measures adopted?

Do we use average income indicators for reducing

social inequality and improving quality of life?

The countries in the developing world whose

economies have performed better and have shown less

vulnerability in the context of the world crisis have been

those that have understood, in time, that investing in

training our peoples and improving the quality of life of

our peoples is the best way to reduce our vulnerability

and to maintain economic growth. The economy must

serve the people, not the reverse.

In the debate on development, we must reaffirm

as peoples and as Government leaders that we have

learned quite often through painful experience that

equality and sustainability are key prerequisites for

ensuring sustained and sustainable economic growth.

Today, we know that it is not enough to have economic

growth in order to reduce social inequity and to

improve the quality of life of our peoples. Nor is it right

to sacrifice our people in the hope that the growth of

an economy will ultimately lead to benefits for all and

reduce social inequality. That expectation quite often

remains unmet. On the contrary, experience has shown

that by improving the quality of life and by reducing

poverty and social exclusion, we can help stimulate

healthy economic growth.

In the context of international crisis and

uncertainty, we must reduce national and international

social inequalities. We must increase social cohesion

and strengthen democratic governance. We also know

that economic growth, which does not take account of

the limits of natural resources and the needs of future

generations, will entail the risk of imminent collapse.

We must revise the ideas about development that have

prevailed in the international financial system.

Equity and sustainability are two sides of the

same coin, and that is how we must approach human

development. That vision is consistent with international

declarations on sustainable development, such as the

Declarations issued by the United Nations Conference

on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, by

the Rio Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992, and

by the World Summit on Sustainable Development in

Johannesburg in 2002. They promoted the three pillars

of sustainable development: environmental equity,

economic equity and social equity. Development means protecting environmental systems, raising the

productive capacity of goods and services and reducing

social inequality by raising the quality of life of all men

and women, multiplying capacities and opportunities.

Today, 7 billion people inhabit the Earth. Of those,

43 per cent, or 3 billion, are under the age of 25. We

must invest so that our young people have the skills and

opportunities to tackle creatively the development tasks

that face our societies. For many years, the development

of countries has been assessed by international financial

institutions, using measures of income or national

production expressed per capita in order to determine

the state of material well-being. Based on that kind

of measure, our country, the Dominican Republic,

has been classified in recent years as a medium high

income country.

Nonetheless, more than a third of our citizens live

in poverty. How then is it possible to exclude countries

like ours from receiving development aid? By the same

token, to give an international comparison, poverty has

been measured in terms of income, with those families

that subsist on less than $2 a day being defined as poor

and those who live on less than $1.25 as extremely poor,

an adjustment being made in both cases for buying

power.

According to those criteria, over 2 billion people

worldwide — 33 per cent of humanity — are poor, and in

2005 the number living in extreme poverty had dropped

to 1.4 billion. Those same measures project that by 2015

only 883 million will be living in extreme poverty. The

optimism of those international figures does not appear

to coincide with the perception of many of our citizens,

who feel that the increase in gross domestic product

does not reflect their needs or despair, nor does it jibe

with the unhappiness of our young people who, despite

raising their educational level, are still unable to find

dignified work or the opportunities to fulfil their

business aspirations.

That discrepancy between the optimism of certain

international indicators and the discontent on our streets

can be explained by the fact that we are using inadequate

tools to measure poverty, development and well-being.

At least in the Dominican Republic, it is hard to believe

that the quality of life and the opportunities to improve

it would be very different for a person with an income

of $2 a day than for someone earning a few cents less.

Poverty in a given family or community is much more

than the lack of income with respect to a predetermined threshold, just as the development of a country is much

more than the size of its median income.

The International Labour Organization reported in

2010 that 81 million of the 620 million young people

between the ages of 15 and 24 worldwide who were

economically active, which represents 13 per cent

of that age group, had been unemployed during the

preceding year, primarily due to the world economic

and financial crisis. Between 2007 and 2009, the global

unemployment rate for young people experienced the

greatest rise in its history: from 11.9 per cent to 13 per

cent. Young women had a harder time than young men

in finding work.

The results in terms of health, education and

maternal and child mortality show the limits of

the unilateral and optimistic focus on poverty and

development. Not without reason have some academics

said that

“we are gambling with the fate of our planet with

‘games’ in which a few private players reap the

benefits and society pays the consequences. A

system that permits results like those is destined to

mismanage risk”.

Social investment in the education, health and

employment of young people can build the foundation for

a strong economic base that can halt the transmission of

poverty from one generation to the next. Strengthening

young people’s skills creates the conditions for them to

earn higher income during their productive economic

lives. The way we understand and measure poverty

translates into national and international policy

decisions.

To assume that poverty and underdevelopment are

simply the expression of family income or national

averages has led to limited social policies of entitlement

or transfers. Such policies temporarily raise the income

of impoverished families above the so-called poverty

line, at the expense of developing universal, more

effective and better-quality public service systems that

would benefit, as a right, those who have traditionally

been excluded.

Adam Smith, the father of economic liberalism,

included in his definition of poverty such social and

cultural aspects as “the ability to go about without

shame”. More recently, the Nobel Prize winner in

Economics Amartya Sen spoke of development itself

as freedom. In that sense, broadening our concept of poverty to include measures of social participation and

inclusion, as well as unmet basic needs, will allow us to

develop more holistic and effective responses. Poverty

is a multidimensional phenomenon, a complex system

of problems that requires a systemic solution leading to

broader skills, freedom and opportunities for those who

have traditionally been excluded.

Investment in quality universal education and health

systems, a universal safety net, access to dignified

work and living spaces, personal safety and the security

of goods, inter alia, are crucial elements for expanding

the skills and opportunities of impoverished portions of

the population. Poverty reduction is the basic lever for

increasing the production of goods and services and for

propelling new dynamics of growth and development.

Assessing the development of countries exclusively on

the basis of their national per capita income leads to

decisions that have a negative impact on our efforts at

development. When a country is ranked according to

those simple criteria, the contribution of international

cooperation is reduced and access to loans from

international financial institutions is reduced or

becomes more expensive.

As developing countries, we also need to shoulder

our share of responsibility. Domestically, we need to

improve our information systems in order to better

understand our social, land and gender inequalities,

as well the impact we have on the environment. At the

same time, we must redirect our investment patterns

and our public policies to promote equality and social

inclusion for the most vulnerable groups, and for that

we need the support of the international community..

A country should not cease to receive development aid

simply because its average national income has crossed

a certain arbitrarily defined threshold.

Latin America has long experience with the

search for multidimensional measures of poverty and

development. Since the middle of the last century,

the Economic Commission for Latin America and the

Caribbean has developed a methodology based on an

index of unmet basic needs. Many countries have

applied such composite multidimensional indexes. In

the Dominican Republic we use a quality of life index

tailored to our reality. The United Nations Development

Programme has applied the human development index,

and a number of other indexes have been proposed at the

international level. Despite that, the majority of bodies

in the international financial system continue to rely

on one-dimensional measures that focus on monetary income to assess and categorize the development of our

countries and to determine their policies on the basis of

criteria for international financial support.

We wish to avail ourselves of this opportunity to

urge international financial organizations to be more

ready and willing to embrace our efforts to break

the vicious cycle of poverty and social exclusion as

the basis for development. We need to use enhanced

indicators with a greater capacity to capture and

measure the complex dynamics of human development.

What is needed is for us to work together to overcome

exclusion, not to prolong poverty and extreme poverty

indefinitely.

The Dominican Republic reiterates its firm

commitment to peace, tolerance and international

coexistence as well as to democracy and freedom as basic

components for development. We hope that sustainable

development will enrich the daily lives of individuals,

families, communities and countries and will preserve

our natural resources. Peace, the abolishment of

social inequality, environmental sustainability and the

sustained growth of our capacity to produce the goods

and services required by our peoples go hand-in-hand,

and they are the very core of development.