Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Thursday that the three-day high-level UN conference on economic and financial crisis is a "hopeful moment."

"Convening of this conference reflects the fact that developing countries have been very badly hit by this global economic crisis," he said at a press conference here on the sidelines of the event.

"They are among the innocent victims. This crisis has affected even those developing countries that pursued good macro (economic) policies, sound regulation," said the Columbia University professor.

Stiglitz said sentiment should be reflected in the outcome document of the conference, expected to be approved upon the meeting's conclusion on Friday.

"We always understood that one cannot resolve problems of the complexity of this crisis in a three-day meeting," he said. "The G20 made that same point when they had their meetings both in Washington and London."

"What one can hope to come out of a meeting like this is a consensus, a shared understanding of some of the factors that contributed to the crisis ... and then a process, a procedure, that has the prospect of beginning to make progress on dealing with those problems," he said.

"That I think is why I think this is, perhaps, a hopeful moment," he said.

Stiglitz, also head of a UN panel of experts on the financial crisis, said his commission has made a number of suggestions on how to deal with the immediate problems of the crisis as well as on the longer term and structural reforms.

"We see the work of this commission and this UN meeting as complimentary to the other efforts going on to address problems of the crisis," he said.

"Discussions in this meeting highlight why it is one needs to go beyond the G20, one needs to have a more representative, inclusive process," he added.

(Xinhua News Agency June 26, 2009)