Development Aid...

Written by former Harvard economist Dr Jeffrey Sachs, the report calls for much higher spending on development. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who received the report from Dr Sachs, said the goals of the project were not utopian but "eminently achievable".

"Many countries are making real progress in achieving them but other are not moving fast enough," he said. BBC developing world correspondent David Loyn says the report is an attempt to engage real change in the UN to go along with grandiose declarations.

"The system is not working right now, let's be clear," Dr Sachs said. "The overwhelmingly reality on our planet is that impoverished people get sick and die for lack of access to basic practical means that could help keep them alive and do more than that - help them achieve livelihoods and escape from poverty."

Dr Sachs singled out malaria, which kills as many people as in the whole Indian Ocean wave disaster every month and could be easily remedied by such measures as the provision of mosquito nets. "Every month, 150,000 children in Africa, if not more, are dying from the silent tsunami of malaria, a largely preventable and utterly treatable disease," he said.

Dr Sachs added that the resources needed were well within the means of the world's richest nations. But only five nations - Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden - have met self-imposed targets of providing 0.7% of GNP for development assistance. The report will recommend that some well-governed poor countries should be fast-tracked for aid, whereas others with poor human rights records should get no large-scale aid.

However, the tying of aid to a list of demands over how well countries are run has been highly controversial. Middle-income countries with pockets of extreme poverty, such as China, Brazil, Malaysia, Mexico and South Africa, should eliminate those pockets, the report adds. But Dr Sachs' solutions are not as radical as some observers would like, he adds.

For example, the report falls short of demanding something which he himself has separately called for - for African countries to take the debt issue into their own hands and stop paying interest on bad debts. ...