China's poverty alleviation deserves recognition: UNDP chief

BEIJING, March 5 (Xinhua) -- China's method of poverty alleviation is valuable and deserves recognition, a senior United Nations official has said.

"I think China's pathway and choices that it has taken are both in quantitative terms and in policy lessons learned very valuable, and deserve also recognition for the way that it has made the eradication of poverty a national priority," Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Achim Steiner said.

The remarks were made on the occasion of the release of "Chinese Poverty Alleviation Studies: A Political Economy Perspective," a report published by New China Research, the think tank of Xinhua News Agency.

"We have watched a number of countries who have made poverty eradication a priority, China being one of them," Steiner said, adding that these are examples that give us hope and courage as leadership and poverty-focused designs in national development policy not only matter, but also deliver results.

The UNDP chief also praised China's approach of deploying digital technologies to enable poor people to find a faster way out of poverty, saying "we remain keen to study those lessons."

"We need to ensure that digitalization serves the development objectives of a country and not just the actors within the digital technology and software world that bring their ingenuity indeed to the marketplace," Steiner said, emphasizing that the digital future could make our societies more resilient, less unequal, more sustainable, or the opposite.

The UNDP will continue to help countries address the issue of extreme poverty, he said.