Jeffrey Sachs started his career as a brilliant academic, tenured at Harvard at 28. He then became adviser to policymakers in troubled economies. Now he has transformed himself into an advocate for the poor in developing countries. He is heard with respect everywhere and has been extremely successful in drawing the attention of world leaders on what he considers an eminently solvable but appalling problem of poverty.

His book, “The End of Poverty” (Penguin Press, 320 pages, $25.95) lays out his arguments. It is an important book, very well written and full of passion. It clearly conveys Mr. Sachs’s outrage that appalling poverty continues to exist amidst plenty. But some parts of the book are much better than others, and some parts are very misleading, if not altogether wrong. His version of global economic history since the 18th century and of determinants of underdevelopment is mundane, and it is only after a lengthy discussion of his own endeavors in countries across the globe that he proceeds to the real meat of his argument.

Start with Mr. Sachs’s account of his work as an adviser to Bolivia, Poland, and Russia. He understandably plays up the role of his advice in rescuing Bolivia and Poland and blames a lack of success in Russia on the failure by its policymakers to implement his advice. Nearly two decades after Mr. Sachs left Bolivia, it is again in a political crisis – GDP per capita has been stagnating since 2000, the deep divisions in the society have not changed, and future prospects look dim. Mr. Sachs blames the geography of Bolivia as a land-locked mountainous country and the relative neglect of the United States and other donors for this state of affairs.

This is not entirely convincing – under the same circumstances, Bolivia sometimes turned in stellar performance in the past. The problem is its domestic political economy, not in its failure to get external aid. One of Mr. Sachs’ favorite whipping boys is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He excoriates it for not agreeing to his debt cancellation proposal and for opposing his advice to Bolivian authorities to sell their meager foreign exchange reserves to stabilize the exchange rate and inflation.

I do sympathize with his criticism of IMF’s continuing role as a debt-collection agency, but as far as the sales of exchange reserves, Mr. Sachs merely turned out to be lucky: Market expectations moved in the desired direction and the exchange rate stabilized. Expectations could have moved the other way with reserves rapidly running out and resulting in a free fall of the currency, thus validating the IMF!

Poland is not Bolivia. It is located strategically as a neighbor of Germany and has the prospect of becoming a member of the European Union after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So it is not surprising that Mr. Sachs’s orthodox program of stabilization, liberalization, privatization, instituting a social safety net to cushion adjustment and institutional reform succeeded. His success in talking the United States government into setting up a 1 billion zloty stabilization fund helped immensely.

On Russia Mr. Sachs admits to having been more optimistic than warranted about getting a great deal of United States aid. Still, he has no second thoughts about his advice: “Most of the bad things that happened …were directly contrary to the advice that I gave and to the principles of honesty and equity that I hold dear.” This is disingenuous: Any advice, if it is to be useful, has to allow for the possibility of corruption and political constraints precluding the advice being properly implemented.

On China, Mr. Sachs makes obvious points about the differences in its initial conditions when it opened up its economy in 1978, as compared to those of Russia and Eastern Europe after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Chinese communists have had spectacular success in transforming the economy toward an open and substantially market-driven one in the short span of less than three decades. Mr. Sachs also asks the all-important question of whether the very same communists would achieve a similar orderly transition to a representative democracy. For the sake of the world, I hope they would, but it is by no means assured.

Finally, we come to Mr. Sachs’s treatment of India, which tells the familiar story of its breaking out of a rigidly controlled socialist economy, hesitantly in the 1980s and systemically after the 1991 macroeconomic crisis. The results have been spectacular, second only to China’s. There is confidence in India’s being able to compete in world markets for goods and services – including, of course, in information technology. Although China and India are still poor and are homes to a large majority of the world’s poor, their success in reducing poverty significantly through rapid growth suggests that the end of global poverty in the not too distant future is feasible.

The heart of Mr. Sachs’s book is its second half, however, and to begin it Mr. Sachs turns his attention to Africa. The continent is stuck in a poverty trap not of its own making, he says, placing the blame for Africa’s predicament largely at the door of Western donors, the IMF, and the World Bank, which “virtually ran the economic policies of the debt-laden continent, recommending regimens of budgetary belt-tightening … these programs had little scientific merit and even fewer results.”

In Mr. Sachs’s view, the deeper causes of Africa’s poverty lie not in pervasive corruption and periodic ethnic cleansing, but in its adverse geography and the omnipresence of disease, such as malaria, HIV-AIDS and tuberculosis, and death. This argument is not altogether convincing. Even with the very same adverse geography, African countries grew significantly between 1950-70, when world trade grew rapidly and prices of commodities exported by Africa were stable or rising. And although there is no doubt the colonial legacy was dreadful, there was enormous intercountry variation.

Some British colonies such as Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria inherited functioning, though perhaps not deeply rooted, political and legal institutions. The real question is why these institutions did not develop but declined rapidly and – with the sole exception of Botswana’s, which has remained democratic since independence – why governments became authoritarian. African corruption may not be that different from corruption in China or India, as Mr. Sachs suggests. But despite the corruption, those countries did well once they opened up and put in place incentive structures conducive to economic growth. In fact, the necessity of appropriate incentive structures is never mentioned – the most glaring omission in the whole book.

Which brings us to the question of what is to be done. In 2000 Mr. Sachs’s unstinting efforts led to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals by the United Nations, and so his comments on these are especially important. Mr. Sachs views these MDGs as a global compact to end poverty: All that is necessary is for global net official development assistance (ODA) to be raised to roughly $150 billion per year for the 10 years 2005-2015 (compared to the $60 billion in 2003). Although different countries could legitimately have their own priorities as to the relative weights to be placed on these goals, these differences have been ignored, and the achievement of these goals has since become the overarching objective and organizing principle for the World Bank and the IMF.

Yet it is hyperbole to call the U.N.’s goals a compact, which means a contract: A contract commits the signatories to commonly agreed actions on the part of each signatory. Since there is no third-party enforcement mechanism for agreements among sovereign entities, there is no way to enforce it. At best, the goals have rhetorical and hortatory values. Further, Mr. Sachs’s estimates of how great an increase in ODA would be needed to achieve the goals are problematic.

It is not so much that these estimates are based on somewhat wishful thinking, but that by stressing how a relatively small share of rich-country GNP could easily finance the cost, Mr. Sachs leads unwittingly to the belief that only the achievement of MDGs matters most for development. Unfortunately, this is not the case: In order to successfully eliminate poverty and make sure it does not rear its head again, sustained growth is necessary. And to bring about sustained growth, the domestic constraints that Mr. Sachs underplays – namely the governance institutions, corruption, and conflicts – have to be squarely addressed. Mr. Sachs rightly dismisses several myths and magic bullets regarding development, in Africa in particular; by focusing almost entirely on ODA and underplaying domestic constraints, however, he is offering yet another magic bullet.

Let me conclude. The strong moral underpinning of Mr. Sachs’s plea for more aid is very evident. But aid is the transfer of resources from the pockets of taxpayers in rich countries to, by and large, the budgets of poor-country governments. Presenting morality – basically a norm for individual behavior – as a foundation for the transfers by governments is not simple. By telling individuals in rich countries that extreme poverty can and should be eliminated in a reasonable time and providing a blueprint for action as he sees it, Mr. Sachs’s book takes a very important first step.

But it is not enough. Whether or not increased aid will bring about this objective depends both on the feasibility of a significant scaling up of programs that are cost-effective at small scales and, above all, on the actions of citizens and governments of the recipients of ODA. On these two vital questions, Mr. Sachs does not make his case.

Mr. Srinivasan is a professor of economics at Yale University.