Developing countries will enjoy their best year of economic growth in 2004, producing a "spectacular" drop in poverty around the world, the World Bank said this week. But Sub-Saharan Africa remained the global laggard because of its vulnerability to oil prices and more fundamental issues of ineffective economic structures and inefficient government spending, the Bank said, which would only partly be offset by further aid flows and debt forgiveness. The report also warned that the growing trend towards regional trade agreements between countries, rather than multilateral trade deals, were not necessarily a panacea for developing countries' problems.