Abstract

Alternatives to Explosion

The article focuses on the efforts of the United Nations (UN) to explore the common factors involved in the economic development of backward nations and how it can help to marginalize those factors. The largest interest of the United Nations and its specialized agencies today centers on the problem of economic development. The UN's greatest expenditure by far is on the pre-investment work of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which has now reached $1.5 billion. Each year UNDP obtains voluntary contributions, mainly from the rich and developed countries, and a near-matching figure from each developing country. Lately the experts have come to believe that the most important factor in the complicated process of steering a backward nation toward economic independence is proper basic training of its scientists, engineers, agriculture specialists and technicians. It is not surprising, therefore, that half the UNDP's budget is assigned to technical education and planning.