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The article reports on how mobile-phone firms have found a profitable way to help the poor help themselves. Mobile phones have become indispensable in the rich world. But they are even more useful in the developing world, where the availability of other forms of communication--roads, postal systems or fixed-line phones--is often limited. But despite rapid subscriber growth in much of the developing world, only a small proportion of people--around five percent in both India and sub-Saharan Africa--have their own mobile phones. Several operators from developing countries have teamed up under the auspices of the GSM Association, which promotes the use of GSM, the world's dominant mobile-phone standard. They invited the handset-makers to bid for a contract to supply up to six million handsets for less than $40 each. The contract was won by Motorola. Delivery of handsets began in April. This week the procurement process began for more handsets, to be delivered from next January. As well as letting smaller operators pool their bargaining power, this scheme aims to draw manufacturers' attention to the needs of developing countries. The GSMA is now making a 50-country study that will, it hopes, provide conclusive proof of the benefits of cutting taxes on mobile phones.

The article questions why poor democracies are not better at ending poverty. India, unlike China, is a vibrant democracy with a proudly robust habit of turfing lousy governments out of office. Yet, in poverty reduction, at least, China's unelected leaders have done better. A book by Bimal Jalan, a leading Indian economist and former governor of the central bank, lists some of the woes afflicting Indian politics, such as the rise of small parties, the dwindling of inner-party democracy and the shrinking role of Parliament in ensuring accountability. In poverty-reduction, as in growth, India is typical of other developing-country democracies, having achieved steady but not spectacular success. The relationship between caste and class helps explain the wide regional discrepancies in India.

A new report gives governments some facts to ponder about economic development. For a better understanding of the plight of the world's poor, the protestors against capitalism who descended on the World Trade Organisation's meeting in Cancún last month ought perhaps to have gone to Haiti instead. In Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, prospective business people have to wait an average of 203 days for permission to start trading. Then they have to pay registration costs and satisfy minimum capital requirements of around four times the average Haitian's annual income. The juxtaposition of stifling bureaucracy and abject poverty is no coincidence, argues a new report, "Doing Business in 2004", by the World Bank. It offers one of the first consistent, rigorous portraits of the costs of business regulations in poor countries. These often concern macroeconomic questions such as monetary policy and fiscal discipline, and the means of globalisation, such as free trade and foreign investment. Countries such as Haiti which, through colonialism, inherited laws from the French legal system are especially prone to red tape.

Reports that the world's financial leaders have gathered in Madrid, Spain for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to debate about the world's poor continues. Mandate of the World Bank is to alleviate poverty in poor countries; Intention of the IMF to help countries out of financial difficulties; Study conducted by Elliot Berg, an American development economist, which suggests that life for the world's poor may not have deteriorated during the 1980s; Study on Latin America conducted by Oxfam, a British charity, which suggests that after a decade of structural adjustment, and despite economic growth, more people than ever are living in poverty.