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UNITED NATIONS

Plagued by a financial crisis and mounting criticism about waste and mismanagement from the US, UN officials have launched a counter-attack by detailing concrete results achieved by the UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali. Recently, the US accused Ghali of hampering efforts to cut costs and streamline the organization's bureaucracy. Warren M Christopher, undersecretary-general for administration, while listing steps recently taken, said that the core staff of the UN secretariat had been reduced to 9,000 from 10,000 in the last year. One of the major factors contributing to UN's financial problems is the US $1.5 billion owed by the US in arrears.

The benefits of global economic growth have trickled down to a small number of countries while a quarter of the world's people are worse off than they were 15 years ago, says the 1996 Human Development Report prepared by the UN Development Programme, which is based on an index that measures life expectancy, education and purchasing power of each country. The report has highlighted the economic polarisation between and within countries resulting in a widening of the gap between rich and poor people.

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