ABSTRACT
Given the common goals and problems already described, taking account of U.S. interests in cooperation with developing countries, and drawing on the experience of twenty-five years of development cooperation, what should the United States do—acting, of course, in consultation with other developed countries—over the next decade to help developing countries? As a first step toward analyzing U.S. policy choices, let us examine what the developing countries themselves have chosen over the last decade to ask the developed ones to do to increase their incomes, reduce their feeling of dependence, and increase their cooperation in solving the problems of an interdependent world. Their demands can perhaps best be summarized in terms of larger resource transfers and trade opportunities to give them greater prosperity and more independent power in international economic relations. The former has commonly been expressed by 77 leaders in terms of "closing the per capita GNP gap," hardly a practical goal in the foreseeable future. 1 58Reference is increasingly made now to reducing the per capita income ratio, a more modest goal. 2 In practice there is a strong tendency just to concentrate on a substantial growth rate in GNP, something like the target of 6 percent per year in real terms adopted for the 1970s in the U.N. Strategy for the Second Development Decade.
