The World Development Report 2004, ready to be launched ahead of the IMF-World Bank September 23-24 annual meeting in Dubai, observed this and suggested measures for the LDCs to achieve their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

It says too often key services fail poor people in access, in quantity, in quality.

This imperils a set of development targets known as MDGs, which call for halving the global in poverty and broad improvements in human development by 2015.

The report -- World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People -- will be released today simultaneously from Washington and the capitals of all member-countries.

Before drafting the report, World Development Report (WDR) teams visited countries to investigate the quality of services.

Such a team conducted a daylong consultation in Dhaka a few months back with a group of Bangladeshi policymakers, NGO leaders, academics and donor officials.

The team revealed the reasons for poor service delivery in Bangladesh in education, health, water supply, sanitation and other public services.

The attitude of public servants, who are mainly involved in rent seeking, and the "poverty of institutions", with a centralised legacy of bureaucracy from colonial times and a constitutionally-mandated weak parliament have been commonly blamed for poor services.

Concern was also expressed about the private sector in education and health in Bangladesh creating an elite, and possibly undermining political support for public delivery of these services.

Success in reaching the MDGs will depend not just on a faster economic growth and the flow of resources but on the ability to translate those resources into basic services, especially in health, education, water and sanitation, the report says.

Too often, the delivery of services falls far short of what could be achieved, especially for the poor.

Some countries have tried to address the problem, especially by involving poor people in service delivery, and showed impressive results, the report revealed.

The World Bank said giving parents voice over their children's education, patients the say over hospital management and making utility agency budgets transparent can contribute to improving outcomes in human development.

It urged the donors to deliver foreign aid in ways that promote, not undercut, better services for the poor.

The new World Bank report warns that broad improvements in human welfare will not occur unless poor people receive wider access to affordable, better-quality services in health, education, water, sanitation and electricity.

However, the report provides powerful examples of where services do work, showing how governments and citizens can do better.

It says there have been spectacular successes and miserable failures in the efforts of developing countries to make services work. The main difference between success and failure is the degree to which poor people themselves are involved in determining the quality and the quantity of the services they receive.

Spending more money -- badly needed in many parts of the world -- will also not be enough, as public funds are often spent on the wrong services and people are sucked away by corruption, the report noted.