The world's richest countries reiterated a pledge Wednesday to a "significant" increase in aid to developing nations but took no action on debt cancellation.

Ministers from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which groups 30 of the most powerful industrialized countries, said in a statement after a meeting here that they were "committed to significantly increase the volume of our collective aid as agreed in the Monterrey Consensus."

World leaders meeting in Monterrey, Mexico in March 2002 pledged to increase development assistance to poor countries as part of a United Nations campaign to halve the proportion of people whose daily income is less than a dollar by 2015.

The statement said five donor countries -- Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, The Netherlands and Sweden -- currently meet a UN target of allocating 0.7 percent of their gross national income to development aid.

Seven other countries -Belgium, Britain, France, Ireland, Finland, Spain and Germany -- have all committed themselves to meeting the target by a specific date.

The OECD said that if such commitments were met, aid volumes would increase from 78.6 billion dollars in 2004, its highest-ever annual level, to 115 billion dollars by 2010.

The United States, the world's richest nation, devotes just 0.16 percent of its gross national income to overseas development but is the

largest donor in volume terms, making 19 billion dollars available in 2004, according to the OECD.

The OECD ministers also said they recognized that "more has to be done both concering bilateral and multilateral debt relief for indebted developing countries to secure long-term debt sustainability and support progress toward the UN Millennium Development Goals" that call for poverty alleviation by 2015.

The statement made no mention of a movement toward 100 percent debt cancellation for poor countries, many of which have to forego critical social spending in order to meet debt payments to lending agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

OECD members in the Group of

Seven (G7) -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States -- agreed in February to consider debt forgiveness on a "case-by-case basis ... based on our willingness to provide as much as 100 percent reduction" of debts owed to multilateral bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank.

The Group of Seven at a meeting in Washington last month disappointed debt relief advocates by merely re-asserting their commitment to the February statement.

Britain's finance minister, Gordon Brown, the current G7 chairman, said any breakthrough on debt relief or cancellation would have to await a summit of the Group of Eight -- the G7 plus Russia -- in Scotland in July.