Africa is desperately poor, despite being the recipient of tens of billions of dollars in aid over the past few decades. The United Nations (UN) Development Programme says sub-Saharan Africa's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 2002 was $469 compared with $22987 for affluent members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But American economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a Brookings Institution paper titled Ending Africa's Poverty Trap, maintains that only a huge infusion of carefully targeted public investment will pull Africa out of poverty.