U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown lobbied U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill yesterday in an effort to get the United States to increase spending on foreign aid to support what Brown hopes will become a new Marshall Plan for poor nations, the New York Times  reports.

Brown said yesterday that he believes he will be able to convince the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration to step up anti-poverty efforts in light of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which demonstrated a link between poverty in the developing world and direct physical threats to people in industrialized countries.

"Today, what happens to the poorest person in the poorest country can affect the richest person in the richest country," Brown said. Development statistics that highlight the growing gap between the rich and poor have strengthened the movement to increase overall assistance, the Times reports.

As a percentage of gross domestic product, the United States spends much less on development aid than most other industrialized nations.  Brown is calling for an increase in U.S. spending of $50 billion annually and said several World Bank and International Monetary Fund projects provide a prototype for the sort of well-designed initiatives the Bush administration could support (Joseph Kahn, New York Times, Dec. 18).

Brown repeated the U.N. goal of decreasing world poverty by half by 2015.  He first proposed an overall increase in world aid last month in Ottawa during meetings of the IMF and World Bank (Associated Press/CNN.com, Dec. 18).