Mr. Secretary General, Minister Marleau, Mrs. Haq, and all my friends and colleagues here on the panel, and Amartya Sen, thank you for being here today. And thank you also to former Presidents Arias and Ramos for joining us, as well as the distinguished Ministers from a number of countries who are here.

It’s a measure of the tremendous respect that a report which is only ten years old has, that so many of you should have come together today from all over the world to honor it as something of a beacon of light and independence, saying things which many of us say, but saying them with the authority of the United Nations. Because for all its editorial independence, the strength of this publication comes, obviously, from the fact that it has the name United Nations, United Nations Development Programme on it. And for those involved in its founding this is a tremendous tribute that they had the vision and the guts to establish such an extraordinary document. Mahbub ul Haq is rightly honoured today. I would also mention my predecessor but one as Administrator, Bill Draper.

There are several theories about why Bill allowed this report to be established, from: 1) he didn’t know how controversial it was going to be; to 2) he had no idea where it was going; to 3) that he was one of the wisest, cleverest, wryest of people who knew exactly what he was doing, and, behind a façade of pretending he didn’t, was delighted to launch such a subversive publication on the world. And I remember seeing Bill Draper literally the day before he came to UNDP, giving a fund-raiser for then Vice President Bush, in his home in California, and saying, already myself quite a sort of veteran of the UN by that stage, "you don’t know what a snake pit you’re going into, Mr. Draper." And I remember him saying, "Well, it may be right, but if I can just get one or two big things right, that’s the contribution one should make in one’s tenure at the UN." And he certainly did, by investing his support and his trust in Mahbub al Haq and the team.

Let me also very much thank the Rockefeller Foundation and CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, for their financial and intellectual support for this project, which we deeply appreciate.

I would, because I’ve been told not to speak for too long this morning, because, while I’m expected to give complete editorial independence to the Human Development Report, I’m not granted the same independence by its authors. I’m on a strict time limit so that we can hear from Amartya. But I am going to take the fact I control the podium for a moment to make really three points.

One, I feel myself in several ways a child of this report – first, I think Richard Jolly has over the years viewed with some alarm that his early teaching career included myself as a young Cambridge student in the first lecture I ever heard on development economics. So I always tell him that he created me. I’d have gone off and become a lawyer or something sensible if it wasn’t for that lecture. So it’s all his fault, whatever happened since. But second, and in a way more significant to today, let me just say that coming most recently from the World Bank, it would have been inconceivable that the Secretary General would, I think, have nominated a Vice President of the World Bank as Administrator of UNDP if it hadn’t been for the Human Development Report -- and let me explain what I mean by that. Ten years ago through this Report, a rather unusual and at the time rather marginal development doctrine was embraced -- of human development. Over ten years it has become the mainstream thinking. And one of its biggest converts was an institution in Washington called the World Bank and its President Jim Wolfensohn. Read the Comprehensive Development Framework, its introduction written by Mr. Wolfensohn, and you’d think you’re reading the forward by Mahbub ul Haq to the first HDR of ten years ago. It is only because of that great intellectual convergence around the importance of human development that I could walk across the particular rubicon from the Bank to the United Nations. And I feel myself very much therefore a child of the issues raised and mainstreamed in this report over the last ten years, and mean to continue to champion them -- which brings me to my second point.

This is an extraordinary advocacy tool, but its strength as an advocacy tool comes because it benchmarks progress. And as we move to the goals of the UN conferences of halving world poverty, of getting all children, particularly girls, into school by the end of the first decade of the next century, we could make this a powerful annual social report on our collective progress toward these now very attainable goals. So expect from me even a greater assertion of the power of this report as a benchmark on our collective progress. And then, to my third point. In a sense, the Human Development Report has achieved its first target. It has mainstreamed human development as a central, if not the central, issue in development. Now it must take on, in my view, a second task, and the authors know very well my view on this which is the great next frontier we have to cross if we’re to carry on this great mission of development and poverty reduction, is the promotion of good governance. Without institutions which respect human rights, which are accountable and transparent, which have addressed and dealt with the issue of corruption -- without this institution formation at the national, sub-national, regional and global level, we will not succeed. Because money and human development alone, without the framework of institutions and the rule of law, will not allow us to achieve those targets. So I very much hope that in the next ten years, if I’m allowed to make an editorial suggestion to my colleagues, we can address the governance issues with as much originality and provocativeness as we have the human development issues over the last ten years. Thank you all very much.