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...has certainly earned the right to do so. While an economist at Harvard University for more than 20 years and director of the school's Center for International Development, Mr. Sachs served as an economic advisor to the governments of Bolivia, Poland and the Soviet Union, in the process helping to right their economies and implement economic reforms. He has also been a consultant to the IMF, World Bank, OECD, and the chairman of the Commission on Macroeconics and Health of the World Health Organization. Today, he is Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also co-chairman of the Advisory Board of The Global Competitiveness Report

While Mr. Sachs has done most of his work in the public sphere he has done so with one, overriding intention--to improve the public good, namely to ameliorate the lives of poor people around the world. He is currently the Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on a group of poverty alleviation initiatives, the Millennium Development Goals. In his latest book, The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005), Mr. Sachs describes how the Millennium Project hopes to reduce extreme poverty, disease and hunger by 2015 (part of the UN's Global Compact, of which Ivey is a member). I began the interview by asking Mr. Sachs about some of the ideas he discusses in the book.

Ivey Business Journal: In The End of Poverty, you write that "clinical economics," as you call it, is one solution to leading people out of the poverty trap. Describe clinical economics?

Jeffrey Sachs: Clinical economics means doing economic development with the same precision and attention to science--and I'd also add ethical standards--as does the practice of good clinical medicine. Having been married to a clinical pediatrician now for 27 years, I've observed the essence of good clinical medicine, which is of course having a rigorous science base and then being able to provide a good differential diagnosis, as the doctors call it, to any particular patient and the patient's conditions.

So when you see the problem of extreme poverty, just as when you see a fever, one has to understand that there are many possible underlying causes. Treating the symptoms is almost never sufficient. There is almost never a single possible cause for a specific economic syndrome. And just as with clinical medicine, the key is to make a good diagnosis from the various possibilities and then make a good regimen in response. Part of the problem with economics as it's practised now is its very glib attitude, where people often try to peddle their single magic bullets or believe what has worked in one place automatically works the same way in another, rather than understand that since the underlying conditions are different, we need specific approaches that are well-tailored to the specific problems. In the case of Africa, where I have directed a lot of my attention in the past dozen years, I put a lot of stress on Africa's unique geographical burdens of disease, tropical agriculture in a savannah climate, and the problems of isolation, with the lack of basic infrastructure needed for high levels of productivity. This combination of disease,...

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