Jeffrey Sachs Year Quotations

All of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1% of rich world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world: 'You count for nothing.' We should not be surprised, then, if in later years the rich reap the whirlwind of that heartless response.

It's quite possible to arrive in the year 2030 where people are no longer dying of poverty. We could actually help lead a global end-not a reduction, but an end-to absolute poverty...I have always found that a committed, powerful group of leaders, can make a huge difference.

Russia has gone through eight years of continuing economic pain.

My colleagues and I took a stand in our work several years ago that we would not look for the magic bullet, because there is none. These are just basic problems requiring basic work. Nothing magic about it.

If you have a lot of short-term debt, it means that all of that money can be demanded in a very short period of time. Technically, short-term debt means money that's coming due within a year. Typically, it means money that's coming due within 30 to 90 days.

In the early 1990s, when a lot of the developing world opened up to international capital flows... they ended up in very good long-term projects, but projects that weren't going to pay off for five or 10 or 20 years.

we took on as a project helping a village in western Kenya. It was 5,000 hungry people beset with malaria and AIDS. And we said, 'let's apply the recommendations of the Millennium Project in this village with the support of a private donor, because government donors don't seem to do such practical things.' And we helped them get improved seeds and some fertilizer for the planting season. That's all. Very low cost. They produced four times more food this year than last year.

While the Bush administration is prepared to spend $100 billion to rid Iraq of WMD, it has been unwilling to spend more than 0.2% of that sum... this year on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.