The turn of the Millennium is of course just a date. For impoverished people it will not, in itself, change anything. By and large, expensive celebrations have been a luxury of the auent, or at least of auent countries. Nevertheless, it is a date that invites reยฏection on what has gone, and what is to come. It has also been the focus of the remarkable Jubilee 2000 Coalition on developing country debt, and has been marked by protests and riots against genetically manipulated crops and global capitalism. Whatever views are held of these campaigns, they have certainly highlighted the fact that a legacy of the twentieth century has not been the end of deprivation.
`Health for all by the Year 2000', the goal proclaimed by the World Health Organisation and UNICEF in the late 1970s, seems as over-optimistic as President Kennedy's conviction that the problem of poverty would be solved during the 1960s. Five years after the 1995 United Nations World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, at which governments and inter-governmental organizations agreed the aim of reducing by half the proportion of people in extreme poverty by the year 2015, even this seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, the later years of the last century have witnessed plenty of examples of large-scale social transformation, positive as well as negative. On the one hand, many countries in Latin America, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have sustained very low or negative economic growth rates, and Africa in particular has been plagued by civil war and in some cases the collapse of eective state administration. Here there is plenty of evidence of what David Korten calls the global three-fold human crisis of deepening poverty, social disintegration and environmental destruction' (Korten, 1995, p. 21). But, on the other hand, the end of the Cold War, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the movement towards independence for East Timor are all examples of changes, almost universally viewed positively, which were virtually unthinkable even a few years before. In economic terms there have also been extraordinary successes. For example, despite the setbacks of the Asian ยฎnancial crisis of late 1997, it remains the case that the four Asian tigers'