Vienna, December 03: The world’s poorest nations are especially hard hit by the global financial crisis and will feel its impact for years to come, UN officials said today.
These countries already were struggling before the economic downturn took hold and now risk seeing the progress they’ve made in recent years slip, the officials said at a conference in the Austrian capital.
“The current global financial and economic crisis is hitting the least developed countries severely,” said Cheick Sidi Diarra, head of the United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States.
“There is no doubt that the effect of the crisis on (least developed countries) will linger for years.”
According to the UN, 49 countries — 33 in Africa, 15 in Asia and one in Latin America — currently qualify as least developed.
Especially vulnerable to economic shocks, these countries are now feeling the pinch of the financial crisis through, among other things, the decline of investment, tourism, falling exports and trade imbalances, Diarra said.
Kandeh Yumkella, head of the UN Industrial Development Organization, said the financial crisis has caused impressive growth rates of African countries to sag significantly this year. While rich, developed countries are using the financial crisis to transform themselves and improve their performance going forward, poor countries now have to struggle even harder to stay afloat.
–PTI