Commonwealth Finance Ministers Meeting Address at Opening Ceremony, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

19 September 1990

… The economic change of recent years may be less dramatic than the political. But it is as real and rapid, and may, in the long run, be even more important. The last decade has seen great strides in technological development and economic liberalisation. For some, these factors have brought rapid advance to even greater prosperity. For the developed world, most of the 1980s were years of falling inflation and sustained economic growth. Globalisation of production and trade, financial deregulation and the strengthening of regional groupings underpinned that progress. And some developing countries shared the benefits of the advance.

But progress passed most developing countries by, particularly in Africa. They faced persistent problems of poverty greatly exacerbated by adverse external factors and inappropriate economic structures. We saw a collapse of commodity prices and a crippling growth in the debt burden culminating in the now indefensible situation where, according to the latest World Bank report, net resources in excess of $40 billion have in the past year flowed from the poor developing countries to the rich industrialised countries of the North.