Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region will not meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets on poverty reduction, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on Wednesday, urging the governments to focus on more public spending for the poor.

The MDG targets could not be reached unless the governments rapidly improve basic education and increase access to primary health care for the low-income class, the ADB says in Key Indicators 2006, the bank's flagship annual statistical publication released on Wednesday.

"Without a concerted effort to reach the poor, Asia cannot - and will not - attain the health and education-related MDGs," says Ifzal Ali, the ADB's Chief Economist, referring to two of the MDGs, eight goals mostly on poverty reduction that all United Nations member states have agreed to try to achieve as a whole by the year 2015.

Large primary school enrollment deficiencies remain in Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Nepal, and Papua New Guinea, according to Key Indicators 2006.

Meanwhile, countries such as Bangladesh and India have made significant progress in improving access to primary schooling, but concerns remain regarding the quality of basic education and inequalities in enrollment rates, the publication said with a new survey.

In many countries, primary-school age children from poorer households are almost three times more likely to quit school than the richer, while gender-related inequalities in enrollment remain prominent in countries such as Pakistan, it added.

Levels of child malnutrition remain worryingly high in the region, the publication said, noting that Cambodia, India, Pakistan and several Central Asian republics are all in danger of falling short of the target to reduce the under-five child mortality rate to two thirds of 1990 levels by 2015.

Inequalities in health are prominent in many countries with child mortality rates for the poor being two or three times higher than those for the rich, it said.

The ADB publication also called for corrective policy action, which should be aimed at reducing inequalities in health and education at the country level.

The governments' public spending should be pro-poor rather than supporting better-off segments of society, the ADB said.

Key Indicators 2006 contains 38 statistical tables that compare MDG indicators and other key statistics across ADB's 44 developing member countries, each with an eight-year data series on social, economic and financial statistics.

Source: Xinhua