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E.
Encouraging a long-term approach
1.
Development requires a long-term approach
The most fundamental concept of the new approach to economic aid is the focusing of our attention, our resources, and our energies on the effort to promote the economic and social development of the less developed countries.
This is not a short-run goal.
To have any success in this effort, we must ourselves view it as an enterprise stretching over a considerable number of years, and we must encourage the recipients of our aid to view it in the same fashion.
Most of our aid will go to those nearing self-sufficiency
How long it will take to show substantial success in this effort will vary greatly from country to country.
In several significant cases, such as India, a decade of concentrated effort can launch these countries into a stage in which they can carry forward their own economic and social progress with little or no government-to-government assistance.
These cases in which light is already visible at the other end of the tunnel are ones which over the next few years will absorb the bulk of our capital assistance.
Gradually others will move up to the same level
The number of countries thus favorably situated is small, but their peoples constitute over half of the population of the underdeveloped world.
Meantime, over the decade of the sixties, we can hope that many other countries will ready themselves for the big push into self-sustaining growth.
In still others which are barely on the threshold of the transition into modernity, the decade can bring significant progress in launching the slow process of developing their human resources and their basic services to the point where an expanded range of developmental activities is possible.
Aid is a long-term process
The whole program must be conceived of as an effort, stretching over a considerable number of years, to alter the basic social and economic conditions in the less developed world.
It must be recognized as a slow-acting tool designed to prevent political and military crises such as those recently confronted in Laos and Cuba.
It is not a tool for dealing with these crises after they have erupted.
2.
The specific reasons for a long-term approach
( A ) the need to budget a period of years.

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