HOWZAT

The entrepreneur who started this firm has close relatives in the US who made the business connections on the US side. Now the business is thriving. It is moving from data transcription to financial record keeping, and soon into financial consulting and advising for American companies, as well as back-office processing operations. Its employees work in gleaming buildings with broadband internet, satellite hook-ups, and videoconferencing. They have hygienic facilities. They are women whose mothers, typically, were the first in the family to become literate and whose grandmothers were rural labourers.

One of the ironies of the recent success of India and China is the fear that has engulfed the United States that success in these two countries comes at the expense of the US. These fears are fundamentally wrong and, even worse, dangerous.The world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country’s gain is another’s loss, but a positive-sum opportunity in which improving technologies and skills can raise living standards around the world.

Following another visit to India, I continued on to Beijing, China, where economic development is speeding ahead at full throttle. Beijing is a booming city of 11 million. Annual income has surpassed $4,000 per capita, and the Chinese economy continues to soar at above 8 per cent growth per annum.

One night I was the guest of two young couples who took me to one of the trendiest night-spots. On the stage a kind of retro-chic performance of a Mao-era revolutionary opera was being given to a room filled with well-dressed young business executives. Every table had up to half a dozen cell phones lying on it in case any of the hotshot young businessmen and women received calls from clients or the office.

Twenty-five years ago China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Within a generation, it has become one of the most important economies in the world.

What do these four widely divergent images of the globe show us? We see an almost unimaginable divide between the richest and poorest parts of the world, with all the gradations in between. We glimpse the pivotal roles that science and technology play in the development process. And we sense a progression of development that moves from subsistence agriculture toward light manufacturing and urbanisation, and on to high-tech services.

The good news is that well over half of the world, including the Bangladeshi garment workers, is experiencing economic progress. The great tragedy is that one sixth of humanity is not even on the development ladder. Life-saving solutions exist to increase their chances of survival — whether in the form of new farming techniques, or essential medicines, or bed nets that can limit malaria — but these families and their governments simply lack the financial means to make these investments.

They are not able to get a first foothold on the ladder, and so cannot even begin the climb out of poverty.

• Extract from The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, published by Penguin on April 7, £7.99. © Jeffrey Sachs 2005. Order from The Times Books First for £6.79 plus p&p. Call 0870-160 8080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive