‘Countries at very low levels of economic development face such huge challenges that they cannot hope to address them without assistance from the rest of the world’. To what extent do you agree with this view?

The UN classifies a country as a LDC if it meets the three criteria, low income (three year average income of less than US $750), human resource weakness and economic vulnerability (instability of imports, exports, agricultural production etc.). There are 49 LDCs in the world, 33 are in Africa, 15 in Asia and the Pacific and 1 in Latin America. The UN describes them as ‘the poorest and most economically weak of the developing countries with formidable economic, institutional and human resource problems which are compounded by geographical handicaps and natural and man-made disasters’.
These countries face huge challenges such as the quality of life within them, recourses when distributed in many countries are not enough to provide for the needs of people on a sustainable basis. In 2005 it was estimated that 227 million people within LDCs were living on less than US $1 per day. As of 2013 there were 1.2 billion people living of less than US $1.25 a day. In some cases the population has been falling, but high population growth means that the actual numbers have increased in the long term. Poverty is much higher in places such as Africa 374 million people are living on less than US $2 a day compared to 203 million people in Asia.
Another problem these countries face is debt, from the 1970s onwards many of these countries had a debt crisis, and this was due to rising oil prices on the 70s, higher interest rates in the 80s, falling export prices ad problems of economic management. There was no hope of these debts being repaid and so interest has continued to grow. In 1996 the IMF and the World Bank produced the heavily indebted poor countries programme. This