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| Business Words in the News
Friday 27 September 2002
Vocabulary from the business news. Listen to and read the report then find explanations of difficult words below.
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African aid and trade
Summary: A report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development - UNCTAD - the organisation specialising in Third World trading conditions – says that new development plans for Africa are in danger of failing because of unfair trade conditions with the rest of the world and excessive political conditions placed on aid. This report from Mark Doyle:
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| | The News | |
| | | Poverty alleviation packages are now the core of most official development aid flowing to Africa, whether from bodies like the IMF or individual donor countries. But this UN report says the packages could fail to produce economic growth because they're implemented in a hostile, sometimes unfair, trading environment. It says Africa's domestic savings, because people are so poor, are necessarily too low to provide investment needed to kick-start economies, so more aid money is needed. And it says that tariff barriers around rich countries, protecting for example European agriculture, do not make for a level playing field. The UNCTAD report also, more controversially, questions the widespread political conditions now attached to aid. It says that although western calls for good governance or respect for human rights, sometimes set as preconditions for lending, were good aims in themselves, they could crowd out the main aim of the lending which was generating growth. Mark Doyle, BBC.
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| | The Words
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| | | poverty alleviation
an approach to development which aims to generate economic growth by aiming resources directly at poor people
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| | | packages
sets of offers , proposals or arrangements made by governments or organisations
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| | | core
the central or most important part
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| | | IMF
International Monetary Fund – an international agency which is part of the United Nations and which tries to promote trade and improve economic conditions in the countries that belong to it
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| | | donor countries
countries that give aid or money
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| | | kick-start
restart economic growth
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| | | tariff barriers
high tax on goods coming into a country which make it difficult to export to that country
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| | | a level playing field
a situation which is fair and in which opponents have equal advantages
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| | | governance
governing or control
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| | | crowd out
to keep something out by having too much of something else, in this case too many good aims which keep out the most important aim
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