The timing could not have been better. Last Monday, the federal holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, one of the slowest news days of the year, the United Nations released “Investing in Development,” the long-awaited report of the committee it had named to evaluate progress made in the past five years toward achieving the “Millennium Development Goals” approved by its member nations in 2000. And although the report contained nothing unexpected, on Tuesday it made it onto newspaper front pages not only in New York but all over the world.

Those Millennium Goals include specific targets for, among other things, reducing the prevalence of global poverty, female illiteracy, disease, malnutrition and lack of access to sanitation and clean drinking water by the year 2015. The report, coordinated by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, does not propose any new goals, Mr. Sachs told The New York Sun, but it does suggest a number of “Quick Win” actions that can speed progress toward the goals a minimal cost. Among those proposed actions: free distribution of anti-malaria bed nets to children in high-risk areas by the end of 2007; the ending of fees for primary schools and essential health services by the end of 2006; extending school meal programs to all children in hunger plagued areas by 2006; distributing massive amounts of chemical fertilizers to smallholder farmers by 2006; providing anti-retroviral drugs to three million AIDS patients by the end of this year.

The report calls on rich nations to open their markets to imports from the poorer countries and to share technology with them. It also asks the donor nations to increase substantially the amount of money they devote to development assistance. Since 1970 the member states of the UN have agreed that the target level for such aid should be 0.7 percent of each donor country’s GDP, but, despite pledges to work toward that target, only five countries are currently meeting it: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The world’s only economic superpower, the United States, devotes just one-tenth of 1 percent to development aid; if it were to reach the 0.7 percent target it would have to increase its aid budget by $60 billion a year.

What reason is there to expect that the donors are going to be any more conscientious about honoring their aid commitments in the future when, as Professor Sachs was quick to concede, “development efforts clearly didn’t work” in the past? For one thing, he said, there is a new sense in the world that poverty is linked to failed states, to terrorism and global insecurity. In other words, development is no longer a “soft policy issue” but a matter of national security. For another, the rich world has gotten richer and the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has shrunk, he said.

One reason why so-called “development assistance” has failed to eradicate poverty so far, he said, is that it has been motivated largely by geopolitical goals-such as cold war allegiances or Mideast peace efforts-rather than economic betterment. Such geopolitical goals may or may not be worthwhile, Professor Sachs said, “but they are not development assistance. Why don’t we try that for once?”

In the week that has passed since the report was released, Professor Sachs said, it has been warmly received in many quarters, most notably the European Commission, the United Kingdom and Germany. In the U.S. its recommendations have won praise from international activists and newspaper editorialists. But among politicians the response has been far more muted. Acknowledging that a perennial complaint at UN development conferences is that the donor countries lack “political will,” Professor Sachs would say only that he is “cautiously optimistic that we’re going to get some resonance” on the report from political leaders now.