The 1975 and 1997 White Papers compared: enriched vision, depleted policies?

THE 1975 AND 1997 WHITE PAPERSCOMPARED: ENRICHED VISION,

DEPLETED POLICIES?

ADRIAN HEWITT AND TONY KILLICK*

Overseas Development Institute, London

Abstract: The 1997 White Paper on international development is the ®rst such policy

statement since 1975. Comparison of the two thus gives us an opportunity for assessing

how o�cial thinking and politics in the UK have responded to the many changes that

have occurred in the meantime. This article ®rst compares the views of the two papers on

the nature of development and of the poverty problem; and then compares the treatment

of EC/EU issues. Neither Paper was just about aid. We conclude that WP75 appears

comparatively narrow in focus and unsophisticated in its appreciation of the problems

addressed, but is better at taking a strategic view and more forthcoming about speci®cs.

What WP97 gains in the breadth and sophistication of its appreciation of problems it

loses in detachment from reality and retreat from speci®cs. Its treatment of EU issues is

surprisingly laconic. But overall WP97Ðin its various formsÐ is more accessible and

decidedly more populist. It has already been disseminated to a far wider audience than

WP75 ever reached. Its success is in simplifying a world which development o�cials

know has grown more complex; its failing is that they seem unsure about speci®cally

how their in¯uence and modest resources can best be applied to improving it. # 1998

John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

1 INTRODUCTION

It will surprise many that the 1997 White Paper on international development(DFID, 1997, hereafter referred to as WP97) was the ®rst such policy statement to beissued publicly since 1975 (Ministry of Overseas Development, 1975, hereafterreferred to asWP75, during the term of the previous Labour government. During thelong period of Conservative rule, in 1979±97, successive ministers decided to managewithout such a comprehensive statement, no doubt on the grounds that to attempt toproduce one would stir up enough controversy within the Conservative Party and its

CCC 0954±1748/98/020185±10$17.50# 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of International DevelopmentJ. Int. Dev. 10, 185±194 (1998)

* Correspondence to: Dr Tony Killick, Overseas Development Institute, Portland House, Stag Place,London SW1E 5DP, UK. e-mail: [email protected]

supporters that it was preferable to leave the dog sleeping. Of course, that does notmean that there were no development policies during 1979±97, merely that they weremore internal to the responsible department, less elaborated and transparent. Themain policy shift for the 1980s (and much of the 1990s), for instance, was signalledonly by a short statement to Parliament that the Thatcher government intended`to give greater weight in the allocation of our aid to political, industrial andcommercial considerations alongside our basic development objectives' (HC Debates,20 February, 1980).

Since the mid-1970s a huge amount has happened on the development front. Thewhole East Asia phenomenon has come to the fore. There, and in various otherpreviously impoverished countries, average living standards have been transformed.There has been a politicalÐand policyÐ transformation in Latin America. Conven-tional wisdom about the mainsprings of economic growthÐparticularly as theyrelate to the roles of markets and statesÐhas changed greatly. Poverty has moved upthe international agenda, fallen back and been promoted again. The star of `structuraladjustment' has risen and, to some extent, faded. The infotech revolution hasgathered pace, the most spectacular example of a wider acceleration of technologicalchange. A raft of environmental concerns increasingly impinges on discussions oflong-term development, with `sustainability' the watch-word. Only in sub-SaharanAfrica has distressingly little changed: it is there, to a far greater extent than in themid-1970s, that the classical development problem is seen as being concentrated.

Comparison of the 1975 and 1997 White Papers therefore gives us an opportunityfor assessing how o�cial thinking within the UK has responded to these trans-formations and the extent to which it has been able to adapt its policies to thesechanging realities. The following falls into two parts: ®rstly, a comparison of theviews taken in the two papers of the nature of development, its motive forces and keyconstraints, and of the nature of the poverty problem which both papers place at thetop of their agendas; secondly, an examination of the treatment of EEC/EUdevelopment issues arising from comparison of the papers.

Perhaps fortuitously for the present authors, the 1997 White Paper makes referenceto its 1975 predecessor (in para 1.2).1 The documents' political authors, Judith Hartand Clare Short, in fact have many similarities of approach: both were or are radicalreformers on the left of the Labour Party. Yet di�erences of approach emerge even atthe titular stage. Although both WPs are policy documents on development (only thequali®er has changed from òverseas' to ìnternational' over 22 years), the titular aimsof the Judith Hart White Paper are more modest, and perhaps seasoned by longer andmore recent experience in government. WP75 is about improvements (`changingemphasis; more help for the poorest'). The WP97 wants no less than this, butexpresses its aims apocalyptically as a secular challenge: in the Secretary of State'sintroduction, she claims that if this challenge is not met, `there is a real danger that bythe middle of the next century, the world will simply not be sustainable'.

1 As indicated above, the White Papers will be referred to as WP75 and WP97 respectively. WP97 hasnumbered paragraphs with a pre®x indicating the relevant chapter, e.g. 3.16 is paragraph 16 of chapter 3,and we will refer to them in that way.WP97 also has a number of `Panels' (boxes), which are referred to bytheir numbers. WP75 has chapters with Roman numbering and numbers its paragraphs by chapter butwithout pre®xes. For convenience, we add Roman pre®xes so that, e.g., our II.4 refers to paragraph 4 ofchapter II of WP75. Since each has a di�erent system of pre®x numbering, it should be clear throughoutwhich paper is being referred to.

# 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 10, 185±194 (1998)

186 A. Hewitt and T. Killick

Both WPs acknowledge the same starting-point, the extreme poverty of much ofthe world's population, as the imperative for action. But the WP75's innovativemeans for achieving thisÐa `basic needs' approach and integrated rural develop-mentÐare mentioned somewhat curtly in 1.2 of WP97 and never referred to again:as historically unique selling points of a past government policy, we shall accord themsomewhat closer scrutiny, below.

2 DEVELOPMENT, POVERTY, CONSTRAINTS

The Content of Development

WP75 is not much given to discussion of concepts. It seems to have taken for grantedthat there was consensus on the meaning and nature of development. What is clear,though, is that it is about economic development: the pursuit of growth tempered bydistributive policies to ensure that increments to income are widely shared. Ruraldevelopment is its main policy thrust (explored further below), the core component ofwhich it sees as increased agricultural productivity and output (IV. 1,2). Per capitaincome remains the best (if ¯awed) indicator of relative national well-being (II. 2).

There are passages in WP97 which suggest a similar approach. Thus: `Sustainabledevelopment to eliminate poverty rests above all on the achievement of economicgrowth that is not only stable and vigorous, but which embraces poor people andallows them to share in the fruits of development' (1.17). Elsewhere, however, it takesa more nuanced view. In a section headed `The complexities of development' it writesof the di�culties of maintaining an appropriate balance between the generations,between reducing today's poverty and safeguarding resources for future generations(2.1). Indeed, the recurring emphasis on environmental considerations and sustain-ability is one of the features which most sharply di�erentiates WP97 from its pre-decessor. And, as will be shown shortly, the view it takes of the poverty problem takesit well beyond the traditional economist's concentration on income poverty.

Engines and Constraints

A similarly more holistic perspective is also evident in WP97's treatment (largelyimplicit) of what it sees as the main propulsive forces of development and the chiefconstraints. Re¯ecting the conventional wisdom of the time, WP75 largely saw thesematters in terms of the availability of ®nance, as foreign exchange and as the source ofgrowth-generating investment. It was therefore much concerned with the negativeterms-of-trade and ®nancial e�ects of the ®rst (1973) oil shock, particularly onoil-importing low-income countries (I.6±15), which it saw as a major shock to whichthe UK and other donor nations needed to respond if development were not to be setback, particularly in countries without access to international capital markets.Although it is hard to point to a speci®c passage which states as much, a clearinference of WP75 is that development is driven by ®xed capital formation.

By contrast, WP97 plays down the role of what it calls `created capital'. Indeed,di�erentiating it from `natural' capital (the environment and natural resources),human capital and social capital, it is rather negative about created capital (Panel 2):


The 1975 and 1997 White Papers Compared 187

`Development trends to date have tended to overlook how far the build-up of createdcapital has been at the expense of natural capital.' Instead, the emphasis is oninstitutional and policy variables, again in considerable contrast with WP75. In theseareas, the tone ofWP97 is impeccably New Labour: `Those most likely to succeed willhave e�ective government, enlightened legislation, prudent budgeting and an e�cientadministration that responds to the needs of poor people' (2.2).

In a rather desperate-sounding attempt to maintain `balance' (1.15±16), the newstatement claims to see an opportunity to create à new synthesis' between what itdescribes as the two ¯awed models of the past half-century, one seeing developmentas state-led, the other involving a minimalist state and unregulated market forces(what do they have in mindÐ the early years of Pinochet's Chile perhaps?). WP97leads policy ®rmly in the direction of the market and of ®nancial orthodoxy.

Thus, where WP75 had little to say about trade as an engine of development(contenting itself with `trade is important in the development process' X.1), itssuccessor is much more forthcoming: `. . . the experience of recent years in the mostsuccessful developing countries has clearly demonstrated the value of . . . promotingmore open and less regulated domestic and foreign trade' (1.18); `We will encourageand assist developing countries to become more fully integrated into the multilateralsystem and to participate in the WTO' (3.15); globalization `presents great oppor-tunities', although there is a danger the poorest countries will be left behind and thatit will increase inequalities (1.8). WP97 thus commends `further comprehensive tradeliberalisation' (3.16), including the liberalization of agricultural trade, which `hashuge potential bene®ts for developing countries' (3.26) (ignoring the more problem-atic impact on food-importing poor countries). This strikes a di�erent tone to theless committed WP75, which (X.9) wrote of the `limits on the extent to which pro-gressive trade liberalisation can be used to bring bene®ts speci®cally to the poorestbene®ciaries' and which still favoured international interventions on world com-modity markets in order to achieve a general agreement for à more orderly, stableand equitable conduct of international trade in commodities' (X.13±15). Thecommodities problem per se receives no mention in WP97.

Pro-market orthodoxy does not only prevail in the area of trade. In their domesticeconomies too, countries `need to have in place the right domestic policy frameworkto deal with a range of competition law and policy issues, such as monopolies,mergers and restrictive business practices' (3.32). The paper is even more insistent onthe importance of à sound and open macro-economic framework' and of `main-taining a sound ®scal balance and low in¯ation' (1.17±18). More generally and in linewith contemporary thinking about aid e�ectiveness, it stresses the importance of thequality of domestic policies: Ònly governments can create the right political andeconomic framework within which the march out of poverty can gather momentum'(1.14). Indeed, the `con®dence that we [HMG] have in their policies and actions' is akey criterion for the selection of potential `partnership' countries (2.25), discussed byKayizzi-Mugerwa, and Maxwell and Riddell, in this issue. Partner governments areexpected not merely to maintain sound policies but to be `responsive and account-able', promoting `civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights' and to èncour-age transparency and bear down on corruption . . .' (Panel 14). To give a speci®cexample of the willingness of DFID to interest itself in internal politics, the paperstates that it is not enough to bring clean water to villages: `The question of who con-trols the pumps and pipes, and how access is determined, needs also to be addressed'



(2.6). Compare all this with WP75's more prudent, less intrusive: `The scope foraction by donors is clearly limited. It is the attitudes and policies of the governmentsof the developing countries that are decisive. The responsibility for dealing withpoverty, unemployment and income distribution is plainly theirsÐ these are indeedhighly sensitive matters at the heart of the internal political process . . .' (III. 2).

By and large, the contrasts drawn above between the two papers re¯ect the changesthat have occurred in professional understanding and political attitudes over the twointervening decades. There are some curious omissions, however. The whole area oftechnology transfer and human skill creation is largely ignored, which is not at all inline with contemporary thought. This is rather extraordinary because the UK's tech-nical co-operation programmes took 61 per cent of the UK's bilateral aid in 1996±97and the UK has much to o�er in this area. Indeed, its negative remarks about the roleof `created' capital appear to overlook the role of capital formation as a vehicle fortechnological progress.WP97 similarly has next to nothing to say on sectoral policies.In over-reaction, perhaps, to the preoccupation of WP75 with rural development, ithas little but the broadest generalities to o�er on the rural economyÐagain a curiousneglect, given the concentration of poverty there. Signi®cantly perhaps, neither paperhas a word to say about industrialization. Both are largely as silent on ®nancial sectordevelopment, as they are on trade in services.

Perhaps most curious of all, however, is the failure of WP97 to attempt a strategicview of how best the UK's aid (and other international development) policies cancontribute to the objectives so eloquently stated. It would seem a natural starting-point for a policy statement which is still mainly about the use of aid (`developmentassistance' is WP97's preferred term) to ask, how can our limited resources best help,where might they make most di�erence? But this is not done. Indeed, the paper isnotably unspeci®c about the nature of future aid interventions, about the implicationsof its aspirations for DFID's own organization and practices, about where it sees theUK programme as having a comparative advantage. The idea of developing partner-ships is the paper's main claim to strategic thinking.

WP75 was similarly de®cient, except that it did at least contain an explicit accept-ance of the limitations on what the UK programme could achieve alone, so thatpromoting `. . . situations in which British concessional aid funds can stimulatematching contributions of concessional funds from other governments . . .' waspromoted to one of the two strands of the paper's aid strategy (I. 16(b) and alsochapters 8 and 9). How realistic it was in the mid-1970s for the UK to expect to exertthis kind of leverage on other donors is di�cult to assess now, but at least somestrategic thinking was in evidence. The UK had, of course, just joined the EEC (seesection 3 below).

The Poverty Problem

Some of the features noted above in the general developmental context are mirroredin WP97's treatment of poverty: a more sophisticated, less economistic view of theproblem; some surprising silences; and a reluctance to enter into speci®cs. Bothpapers, of course, take the reduction of poverty as their main theme. The publicitygiven to this in connection with WP97 should not de¯ect attention from the sub-titleofWP75:More Help for the Poorest. Characteristically, however, the latter spent little



time on de®ning the problem. Although it recognized that providing assistance topoor countries was not equivalent to aiding poor people, it nonetheless pinned a gooddeal of faith on a strategy that concentrated more aid on the poorest countries(I. 16(a)). And its discussion of the assessment of relative poverty, coming down infavour of per capita income as the best indicator, made it evident that it was incomepoverty that it mainly had in mind. WP97 (1.9) takes an altogether more inclusiveview:

Some 1.3 billion people (almost 70 per cent of whom are women) . . . continueto live in extreme poverty, on less than the equivalent of $1 per day . . . they lackaccess to opportunities and services . . . They feel isolated and powerless andoften feel excluded by ethnicity, caste, geography, gender or disability. They lackinformation and access to health and education facilities, to productive assets orto the markets for their goods or labour.

The gender dimension, which received scant recognition in WP75, is a recurringsubject and rates a special panel (Panel 12). Another recurring subject is the mutualinterplay between poverty and environmental degradation, which had no counterpartin WP75.

However, not all the comparisons under this heading are to the detriment of theearlier paper. The close connection between poverty and family size is well known andWP75 was in no doubt that rapid population growth was a problem that had to betackled as an integral part of an anti-poverty strategy (I.3, V.22±24). By comparison,WP97 is reticent, seeking refuge in international resolutions (fudged compromisesthough they are) and the politically-correct formulation that `Britain will do what itcan to enable more people, particularly the poor, to have choices about the numberand timing of their children' (Panel 8). The new paper also has surprisingly little to sayabout employment creationÐ surely absolutely central to any attempt to abolishpoverty. Here too, WP75 was more forthcoming, particularly concerning the import-ance of labour-intensive, employment-creating approaches to rural development(IV. 6±8).

WP75 also scores over its successor in a greater sense of realism about the limita-tions of what aid (and related ®nancial and trade policies) can achieve, particularly inthe di�cult and sensitive area of poverty reduction, and in the inevitable gradualismof progress towards the stated aim. The tone of WP97 is quite di�erent, bullish to thepoint of naivety, as if the elimination of poverty is like in¯ation, a matter ofmanipulating expectations. This, after all, is not the ®rst attempt to use aid to reducepoverty (the paper is ungenerous in ignoring past attempts by Nordic donors, amongothers, to address this problem) but there is little evidence that external aid agencieshave been very successful with this goal, one for which they have no obviouscomparative advantage. For o�cialdom to reach the poor, particularly to reach theextreme poor who are being targeted by WP97, has proved very di�cult. It would bereassuring if there were more public recognition of the di�culties in the paper, morehumility, perhaps, about what it is realistic to hope for.

Notably, both papers shy away from any discussion of the place of redistributivemeasures in an anti-poverty strategy. Land reform, for example, is passed over almostentirely in silence, despite current pressing concerns in Zimbabwe and South Africa(just as Kenya and Rhodesia were apposite for WP75 ). At one level, this silence isunderstandable. Redistribution is a political mine®eld and the desirable extent and



forms of redistribution vary across countries. At another level, however, it is di�cultto see how a paper which states as its objective the halving of extreme poverty within20 years can be taken seriously unless it is willing to broach the inequality issue.Everyone agrees that economic growth is essential to any anti-poverty strategy but fewwho know the evidence would claim that, in countries with large and growinginequalities, growth alone can do the job by 2015, or by 2050 for that matter. Also,given the extent to which the problems are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa andthat this is the region where poverty has been growing proportionately as well asabsolutely, it is surprising how little WP97 has to say that is speci®c to Africa.

Finally, we should revert to the retreat from policy speci®cs. Whether or not itchose the right approach, WP75 had a view of a policy strategy that would provide`more help for the poorest'. It consisted largely of rural development and the paperhad a fair amount to say about that, and about how British aid policies and practiceswould need to change in order to implement the new strategy. It is impossible toderive from WP97 an equivalent understanding of what its attack on poverty wouldmean for the speci®cs of the UK's aid programme (2.3):

A wide range of interventions through development assistance programmes willoften be needed to support economic growth which makes signi®cant progresstowards the elimination of poverty. These interventions include support forthe provision of the basic necessities of life, water and food, investment ineducation, health and family planning services; investment in necessary infra-structure measures to create employment opportunities through the encourage-ment of small-scale enterprise; support for good governance and the rule of lawand ®rm action against corruption; and action to promote greater equality forwomen and to end the exploitation of children.

The problem with such a wide-ranging menuÐand such a tortured syntaxÐ isthat it could be used to justify many changes in aid policies, or none at all, on theground that these things are already being done.

3 CONFRONTING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT POLICY

One of the biggest contrasts between the White Papers is their treatment of Europe.At the time of WP75, the UK had been a member of the EEC for barely two years.Yet a whole chapter (No. IX) is devoted to `the EECÐA New Dimension' and halfof a subsequent chapter on trade policies and the poorest countries is devoted to EECa�airsÐ the Commission's negotiations in the GATT Tokyo Round and the reformof the EEC's GSP Scheme. The material covers the LomeÂ convention (then new, andclearly exciting to the WP's authors), proposals for the non-associates, and the foodaid programme. The scope of detailed policy proposals extends well beyond aid butconcludes with a resounding call still fresh today: `we believe that the Communityshould have a world-wide aid policy'.

By the time ofWP97, the UK has been a EuropeanMember State for a quarter of acentury. Over 30 per cent of the aid programme (and all the trade policy) goes throughthe EC, and European development policies tax DFID's best brains, as they do thoseof other departments. The White Paper was published barely a month before the UKtook over the EU presidency and less than a year before a new mandate for LomeÂ



negotiations has to be agreed. Yet in WP97 there are only ten references to the EC(or the EU), four of them peremptory. The EU gets no reference in Section 1: TheChallenge of Development (even though Europe now supplies the bulk of develop-ment assistance) nor in Section 4: Building Support for Development. It appears innone of the 24 `panels'.

In `Section 3: Consistency of Policies,' where there would seem to be most need forintricate proposals towards coherence and coordination at the European level, the EUreferences are limited to EU market access and tari� preferences (3.16) and rules oforigin (3.18) plus a rather curious and impractical proposal (3.17) for GSP to be`levelled up' to LomeÂ terms (there is no reference to the least developed countries orthe Ruggiero proposal for these). There is also a couple of fairly anodyne references toreforms of the common agricultural policy (3.23) and EU ®sheries agreements with16 developing countries (3.25), neither of which would necessarily be supportive ofdevelopment, plus a more speci®c commitment in 3.24 to look at the short-termnegative e�ects on developing countries of the Commission's Agenda 2000 agri-cultural reform proposals. But there is nothing on the EU's (or Commission's) role inenvironmental policy (not even forestry), investment policy nor, in terms ofconsistencyÐ the subject of the section under discussionÐwhere EU aid policy®ts in. We are far from hearing the echoes of Judith Hart saying it is high time for theEU to have global development policy by now, rather than a number of increasinglydisparate programmes.WP75 was certainly more precise on the overall policy aims asregards Europe.

Within Section 2, however, although more narrowly, some reform proposals forEC aid are adumbrated. In 2.11Ðand in a rare implicit acknowledgement of theprevious government's e�ortsÐ the government commits itself to continuing thestruggle to improve the e�ectiveness and e�ciency of EU aid, mentioning decentral-ized management, coherence and new priorities among the reforms. Some detail isprovided in 2.15 , and only hereÐnot in the `Consistency' or `Building Support'chaptersÐdoes the government state its aim of securing from the Commission and theother Member States `commitments . . . to measurable targets, especially on povertyelimination'. Even this seems to fall under the rubric of the government's aims duringits brief EU presidency (January±June 1998)Ðand promotion of this may not beconsistent with the idea of the Presidency as neutral chairman. Not all Europeangovernments have adopted poverty focus (let alone elimination) as a guiding principleof their aid programme and allocation of aid among LomeÂ Convention (ACP)members has never been left to be determined by poverty indicators or targets. But itdoes re¯ect the recommendation of the Independent Group on British Aid for

better targeting of all EC aid to those who need it most. The experience ofinstitutions as diverse as the World Bank and UNICEF shows that it is possibleto fashion programmes and projects that have an immediate ®rst-round e�ect onthe productive capacity of poor people . . . At least 50% of EDF disbursementsshould be devoted to projects which directly increase the welfare and product-ivity of the very poor (IGBA, 1988, pp. 77±78).

A further, no doubt well-meaning proposal in 2.15 to seek to ènhance the positionof the poorest countries' during the LomeÂ renegotiations could be misconstrued as away of excluding the vulnerable Caribbean and Paci®c countries, which are not



among the poorest. Again the lack of reference to the least developed countries isregrettable.

So even in the Section replete with the most (and most substantial) EC references,`Building Partnerships' (Section 2), WP97 compares rather poorly to its 1975 sister.But just as the Blair±Short team in 1997 is new to government and liable to writehighly ambitious general policy documents, so the Wilson±Hart government in 1975was new to the EEC, and had yet to learn that its reform proposals towards a globalpolicy were not realizable in the short term. We should award each high marks forambition, at least.

Where WP97 disappoints is that it does not yet build on the partnerships wealready have with other European donors, not least those applauded in the 1997 DACReview of the UK, which recognizes that the UK punches well above its weight(in aid-volumetric terms) because of its strong policies and procedures, which standoften as a paragon to other European donors. Where the UK falls down is of coursein aid volume, having now been overtaken even by the Netherlands, so it is regrettablethat, amid all the new target-setting for economic and social development outcomes,there was no space for the government to commit itself to reaching the EU average, interms of aid inputs, of spending 0.37 per cent of GNP. This would be achievable in thelifetime of one Parliament, even with a two-year spending freeze to start with. With-out it, we now expect to start the 1999±2000 Financial Year with an ODA to GNPratio of 0.25 per cent (projected GNP growth of 2.4 per cent in 1998 with unchangedConservative aid spending plans will mean a further contraction in the UK's aide�ort) and with only Clare Short's skills at the bargaining table of the Cabinet (plusproceeds from an eventual CDC sale, if they are made additional to the aid budget) tosecure a massive but untargeted increase in not just appropriations but disbursementsover the following three years. It would be sad if, instead, she had to resort to a furtherslowing-down of EU aid spending in order to maintain the momentum of the newly-created parts of her bilateral programme with still limited funds. The absence of detailon policies for the EU 30 per cent of the budget compared with the ambitious plansfor development partnerships which are cast so far in an essentially bilateral mouldÐbarely 50 per cent of totalÐ thus gives cause for concern.

4 CONCLUSION

So much for our comparison of policy documents: and how do they compare as publi-cations? At 68 pages (WP75) and 82 pages (WP97), the length appears quite similar,althoughWP75 is denser and actually longer.WP97wins on layout and design (exceptfor its irritating `panels'Ðno fewer than 24 boxes, some of them with only a tenuousrelationship to the text and therefore of dubious status in terms of policy) whileWP75has the edge in terms of prose style, (though it loses points for typographical errors2Ðthe EEC is twice referred to as ECC on page 43, and unlike WP97 there is no list ofacronyms to check whether something more subtle was really intended).

Some people have already criticized the price, £9.85, of the new White Paper. Yet itis known that DFID struggled to keep it below the £10 barrier and, adjusted by

2 Deduct a point from WP97, however, for not knowing that there are by now 71 ACP states (see 2.15),South Africa being the latest and arguably most important.



domestic price in¯ation, it is hardly more in real terms, compared with WP75 priceof £1.35.3 VAT is still not charged.

It is in the modern means of di�usion and dissemination that WP97 wins outright.The full text was immediately available on the internet (at www.oneworld.org/d®d)and during its ®rst two months of life had attracted 11,000 hits; its four main chaptersexist in summary form in a document (21 pages) made available free at Sainsbury andTesco supermarket check-outs; and this latter document is available in six furtherlanguages (all Asian). YetÐ to return brie¯y to the second theme of this paperÐ it isnot available in another European languageÐnot even French or Spanish (languagesalso widely spoken in the developing world, especially in Africa and Latin America,respectively. Nor Portuguese, spoken in both Africa and Brazil). Surely it is not justthe domestic audience of Britain's ethnic voters (who speak Chinese, Urdu, Bengali,etc.) who alone are being targeted?

To sum up, each of the White Papers has strengths and weaknesses. In retro-spect and by comparison with its successor, WP75 appears narrow in focus andunsophisticated in its appreciation of the problems to be addressed. Against that, it isbetter at taking a strategic view of what might be achieved through the UK's aidprogramme and more forthcoming about speci®cs. What WP97 gains in the breadthand sophistication of its appreciation of the problems addressed it loses in unrealismand its retreat from speci®cs. It is particularly laconic on EC/EU matters, given thatthe EU now accounts for over 30 per cent of the UK aid programme and all of tradepolicy. Today's development o�cials know the world has grown more complex, butdo they know how their in¯uence and modest resources can best be applied toimproving it? Perhaps in the end, the notion of selectivity through `Partnerships'will prove to be WP97's big idea. Characteristically, that too is an under-developedconcept (see Maxwell and Riddell, this issue) and one which is likely to provevulnerable to the politics of the aid business. It is di�cult to avoid the conclusion that,instead of rushing straight into a new statement of policy, the Secretary of State andher Department would have done better by our `development partners' to have waiteda little longer until it was possible to achieve a better match between aspirations andpracticalities. Yet her domestic audience had been waiting 22 years; a good many oftoday's and tomorrow's development actors would not have been born when the lastWhite Paper was issued. In that sense, WP97 could never come too soon. And was itnot the editorial writer of the New Statesman who greeted the advent of the newWhite Paper by musing that, because of its aim of eliminating world poverty, ClareShort herself might be the new Nye Bevan?

REFERENCES

Department for International Development (1997). Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge

for the 21st Century. Cm. 3789. London: The Stationery O�ce.

IGBA (1988). Real Aid: What Europe Can Do. London: Independent Group on British Aid.

Ministry of Overseas Development (1975). Overseas Development. The Changing Emphasis in

British Aid policies: More Help for the Poorest. London: HMSO.

3 UK domestic price in¯ation since 1975 has been 550 per cent, so that White Paper would cost £7.50 attoday's prices.



Documents

The 1975 and 1997 White Papers compared: enriched vision, depleted policies?