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Extreme Poverty as a Problem for the Global North

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From Charity to Justice

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Abstract

The central argument in this chapter is that the eradication of global poverty will require affluent countries to commit to reforming their own institutions and practices and promoting a fairer global order. I first introduce the state of extreme global poverty, its conceptualisation, measurement, causes and possible solutions. I then discuss why the idea of “global poverty” requires global solutions, by exploring how states and citizens in the Global North can contribute to effective and potentially transformative poverty-reduction approaches. The fundamental solution to extreme poverty, I argue, is politics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Deepak Lal, Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty (Washington, USA: Cato Institute, 2013), 9–12.

  2. 2.

    Surjit Bhalla, Imagine There's No Country: Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in the Era of Globalization (Washington, USA: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2002), 144–146. Note that $1.5 is 1993 Purchase Power Parity price.

  3. 3.

    Bhalla, Imagine There’s No Country, 144–146.

  4. 4.

    Harry S. Truman, “Truman's Inaugural Address, January 20, 1949”, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum, accessed 4 March 2019, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.htm.

  5. 5.

    John F. Kennedy, “John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address”, Wikisource, accessed 4 March 2019, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy%27s_Inaugural_Address.

  6. 6.

    United Nations, “United Nations Millennium Declaration”, accessed 4 March 2019, https://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm.

  7. 7.

    This line has been lifted twice, from US 1 dollar a day introduced in 1990 to US$1.25 as revised in 2005, and now upped to $1.90 (PPP 2011).

  8. 8.

    Jennifer Brinkerhoff, Stephen Smith and Hildy Teegen eds., NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (Springer, 2007), 3–5.

  9. 9.

    United Nations, “MDG Momentum”, accessed 4 March 2019, https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/mdgmomentum.shtml.

  10. 10.

    United Nations, “Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Poverty & Hunger”, accessed 4 March 2019, https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/poverty.shtml.

  11. 11.

    United Nations, “The Millennium Development Goals Report 2015”, accessed 4 March 2019, https://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/MDG/english/UNDP_MDG_Report_2015.pdf.

  12. 12.

    Laurence Chandy, Hiroshi Kato and Homi Kharas, “From a Billion to Zero: Three Key Ingredients to End Extreme Poverty”, in Laurence Chandy, Hiroshi Kato and Homi Kharas eds., The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), 10.

  13. 13.

    OECD, “Net ODA”, accessed 6 March 2019, https://data.oecd.org/oda/net-oda.htm#indicator-chart.

  14. 14.

    United Nations, “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, accessed 4 March 2019, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld.

  15. 15.

    United Nations, “Goal 1: End Poverty in All Its Forms Everywhere.”.

  16. 16.

    Economist, “Fewer, But Still with Us”, 30 March 2017, https://www.economist.com/news/international/21719790-going-will-be-much-harder-now-world-has-made-great-progress.

  17. 17.

    United Nations, “The Millennium Development Goals Report 2015”.

  18. 18.

    Economist, “Towards the End of Poverty—the World's Next Great Leap Forward”, 1 june 2013, https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim.

  19. 19.

    World Bank, “Taking on in Equality”, accessed 4 march 2019, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/25078/9781464809583.pdf.

  20. 20.

    Economist, “Fewer, But Still with Us”.

  21. 21.

    Economist, “Poverty: Not Always with Us”, 1 June 2013, https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21578643-world-has-astonishing-chance-take-billion-people-out-extreme-poverty-2030-not. The figure of 70 cents was calculated with the older IPL, USD1.25 a day.

  22. 22.

    United Nations, “The Millennium Development Goals Report 2015”.

  23. 23.

    Sylvia Chant, “Re-Thinking the ‘Feminization of Poverty’ in Relation to Aggregate Gender Indices”, Journal of Human Development 7, no. 2 (2006/07/01 2006): 201–220.

  24. 24.

    Sophie Mitra, Aleksandra Posarac, and Brandon Vick, “Disability and Poverty in Developing Countries: A Multidimensional Study”, World Development 41 (1// 2013): 1–18.

  25. 25.

    Although in the eyes of intellectuals the Chinese Communist Party lacks adequate legitimacy, repeated polls show it has enjoyed a high level of popular support. See Jinghan Zeng, “The Debate on Regime Legitimacy in China: Bridging the Wide Gulf between Western and Chinese Scholarship”, Journal of Contemporary China 23, no. 88 (2014/07/04 2014): 612–635.

  26. 26.

    Jose G. Montalvo and Martin Ravallion, “The Pattern of Growth and Poverty Reduction in China”, Journal of Comparative Economics 38, no. 1 (3// 2010): 2–16.

  27. 27.

    Linda Yueh, “Is It Possible to End Global Poverty”? BBC, 27 March 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-32082968.

  28. 28.

    For discussion of these problems see Laurence Chandy, Hiroshi Kato and Homi Kharas eds., The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Also Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). discusses these reasons in length.

  29. 29.

    Yueh, “Is It Possible to End Global Poverty”?

  30. 30.

    Veronika Penciakova, Natasha Ledlie and Laurence Chandy, “The Final Countdown: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030″, Brookings Institution, April 2013, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/The_Final_Countdown.pdf.

  31. 31.

    Thomas W. Pogge, Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-poor Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 60. Emphasis in original.

  32. 32.

    Pogge, 60–61. And a similar criticism by the economist Martin Sandbu, “Critics Question Success of UN’s Millennium Development Goals”, Financial Times, 15 September 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/51d1c0aa-5085-11e5-8642-453585f2cfcd.

  33. 33.

    World Bank, “FAQs: Global Poverty Line Update”, accessed 4 March 2019. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/brief/global-poverty-line-faq.

  34. 34.

    Peter Edward, “The Ethical Poverty Line: A Moral Quantification of Absolute Poverty”, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2006): 377–393.

  35. 35.

    Jason Hickel, “Exposing the Great ‘Poverty Reduction’ Lie”, Aljazeera, 21 August 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html.

  36. 36.

    Robert Walker et al., “Poverty in Global Perspective: Is Shame a Common Denominator”? Journal of Social Policy 42 (April 2013): 15–31.

  37. 37.

    David Hulme, Global Poverty: Global Governance and Poor People in the Post-2015 Era (Routledge, 2015), 62.

  38. 38.

    David A. Clark, “Capability Approach”, in David Clark ed., The Elgar Companion to Development Studies, (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006), 32–44.

  39. 39.

    Amartya Sen, “Development as Freedom (1999)”, in J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite, and Nitsan Chorev eds., The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 525–541.

  40. 40.

    See how poverty can be conceived in the human rights approach see Willem Van Genugten and Camilo Perez-Bustillo, The Poverty of Rights: Human Rights and the Eradication of Poverty (Zed Books, 2001); Thomas Pogge ed., Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  41. 41.

    OHCHR, “Principles and Guidelines for a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies”, December 2006, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/PovertyStrategiesen.pdf; also see OHCHR, “Human Rights and Poverty Reduction: A Conceptual Framework”, January 2004. https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/PovertyReductionen.pdf.

  42. 42.

    Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). Gwilym David Blunt Has Tried to Find Support for This Argument in International Law in “Is Global Poverty a Crime Against Humanity”? International Theory 7, no. 3 (2015): 539–571.

  43. 43.

    Elaine Chase and Grace Bantebya-Kyomuhendo eds., Poverty and Shame: Global Experiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  44. 44.

    Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much (Macmillan, 2013). Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao, “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function”, Science 341, no. 6149 (2013–08-30 00:00:00 2013): 976–980.

  45. 45.

    Michael B. Katz, “What Kind of Problem Is Poverty? The Archeology of an Idea”, in Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane eds., Territories of Poverty (University of Georgia Press, 2015), 39–78. The “political economy” category and the “markets” category might seem to be similar, but note that whereas the “political economy” category sees the poor as casualties of a vigorously competitive capitalist economy, the “markets” category treats poverty as the result of insufficiently vigorous markets.

  46. 46.

    Hulme’s Global Poverty offers a rather detailed overview of major theories of global poverty in Chapter 2.

  47. 47.

    Peter Townsend, The International Analysis of Poverty (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 97–101.

  48. 48.

    Townsend, The International Analysis of Poverty.

  49. 49.

    For example, Henry Bernstein, “Modernization Theory and the Sociological Study of Development”, Journal of Development Studies 7, no. 2 (1971): 141–160.

  50. 50.

    Lawrence E. Harrison, “Culture Matters”, National Interest 60 (2000): 55–65.

  51. 51.

    Matias Vernengo, “Technology, Finance, and Dependency: Latin American Radical Political Economy in Retrospect”, Review of Radical Political Economics, 38, no. 4 (2006): 551–568.

  52. 52.

    Lal, Poverty and Progress.

  53. 53.

    Hulme, Global Poverty, 72–73.

  54. 54.

    Hulme, 72–73.

  55. 55.

    For a good discussion on the relationships between culture and diversity see Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small, “Cultural Diversity and Anti-Poverty Policy”, International Social Science Journal 61, no. 199 (2010): 169–180.

  56. 56.

    Hulme, Global Poverty, 58–59.

  57. 57.

    Heloise Weber, “Reconstituting the Third World: Poverty Reduction and Territoriality in the Global Politics of Development”, Third World Quarterly 25 (1): 187–206; also see Alain Noël, “The New Global Politics of Poverty”, Global Social Policy 6, no. 3 (2006): 304–333.

  58. 58.

    Hulme, Global Poverty, 56.

  59. 59.

    Asunción Lera St Clair, “Global Poverty: The Co-Production of Knowledge and Politics”, Global Social Policy 6, no. 1 (2006): 59–60.

  60. 60.

    For example, Ulrich Beck, “Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk”, American Behavioural Scientist 55, no. 10 (2011), 1346–1361; Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology”, International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 576–610.

  61. 61.

    Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda”, British Journal of Sociology 61 (2010): 381–403.

  62. 62.

    Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 17, 116–118.

  63. 63.

    Vernengo, “Technology, Finance, and Dependency”.

  64. 64.

    John Rawls, The Law of Peoples: With the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Harvard University Press, 1999), 108.

  65. 65.

    Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 18.

  66. 66.

    Pogge, 117–118.

  67. 67.

    Townsend, The International Analysis of Poverty, 102.

  68. 68.

    Hulme, Global Poverty, 78; he surveys a range of recent books on global poverty.

  69. 69.

    Alberto D. Cimadamore and Lynda Lange, “The Global poverty consensus report,” Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) & Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP), September 2015, https://academicsstand.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-09-GPCReport.pdf.

  70. 70.

    Hulme, Global Poverty, 71.

  71. 71.

    Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2008; More of Pogge’s arguments will be discussed in the next chapter.

  72. 72.

    International Labour Organization (ILO), World Employment and Social Outlook 2016: Transforming Jobs to End Poverty, 19 May 2016, https://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/weso/2016-transforming-jobs/WCMS_481534/lang--en/index.htm.

  73. 73.

    ILO, 94.

  74. 74.

    ILO, 11; Chandy, Kato and Kharas, From a Billion to Zero, 15.

  75. 75.

    Emmanuel K.Tetteh, Godfred Frempong, Nelson Obirih-Opareh, and Omari Rose, “Does Microcredit Create Employment For the Poor? The Case of the Microcredit Scheme of Upper Manya Krobo Rural Bank in Ghana”, Business and Economics Journal 7, no. 190 (2015): 1–9.

  76. 76.

    Gillian Brock, “Global Poverty, Decent Work, and Remedial Responsibilities”, Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights (2014).

  77. 77.

    Brock, 128; ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook 2016.

  78. 78.

    Trommlerováa, Klasenb and Leßmann, “Determinants of Empowerment in a Capability-Based Poverty Approach: Evidence from The Gambia”. For a more in-depth discussion on the definition of empowerment, see Ibrahim and Alkire, “Agency and empowerment: A proposal for internationally comparable indicators”.

  79. 79.

    Green, From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World.

  80. 80.

    Brock, “Global Poverty, Decent Work, and Remedial Responsibilities”, 128.

  81. 81.

    Duncan Green, From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World, (Oxfam, 2012), 55.

  82. 82.

    A. Trevor Thrall Dominik Stecula, and Diana Sweet, “May We Have Your Attention Please? Human-Rights NGOs and the Problem of Global Communication”, International Journal of Press/Politics 19, no. 2 (April 2014): 135–159.

  83. 83.

    Brock, “Global Poverty, Decent Work, and Remedial Responsibilities”, 129.

  84. 84.

    Roger Riddell, “Navigating Between Extremes: Academics Helping to Eradicate Global Poverty”, Ethics & International Affairs 26, no. 2 (2012): 217–243.

  85. 85.

    An MDG summit held in 2010, which consulted 27 participants from the UN, national governments and development NGOs concluded that “inequalities are the drivers of vulnerability and poverty”. See Dolf Te Lintelo, “Inequality and Social Justice—Roundtable Consultation”, Institute of Development Studies, September 2011, https://www.mdgfund.org/sites/default/files/Inequality%20Roundtable%20report.pdf.

  86. 86.

    Data in 2015 shows that 457 million of the extreme poor are located in middle-income countries whereas 256 million are in low-income countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa. See Rohini Pande, Vestal McIntyre and Lucy Page, “A New Home for Extreme Poverty: Middle-Income Countries: Aid Doesn’t Reach the Majority of the Poor”, 28 January 2019, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/opinion/inequality-poverty-global-aid.html.

  87. 87.

    Riddell, “Navigating Between Extremes”, 217–243.

  88. 88.

    Riddell, 225.

  89. 89.

    Green, From Poverty to Power; Brock, “Global Poverty, Decent Work, and Remedial Responsibilities”.

  90. 90.

    Green, From Poverty to Power, 281; Chandy, Kato and Kharas, “From a Billion to Zero”, 14.

  91. 91.

    Bruce Jones et al., “Concepts and Dilemmas of State Building in Fragile Situations: From Fragility to Resilience, OECD Journal on Development. 9 (2008): 61–148.

  92. 92.

    Riddell, “Navigating Between Extremes”, 226.

  93. 93.

    Roger Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford University Press, 2007), 104.

  94. 94.

    Roger Riddell, “Does Foreign Aid Really Work? An Updated Assessment”, Development Policy Centre Discussion Paper 33, March 1, 2014: 7.

  95. 95.

    Riddell, “An Updated Assessment”, 24–26.

  96. 96.

    Riddell, 24–26.

  97. 97.

    Arne Bigsten and Sven Tengstam, “The Aid Effectiveness Agenda: The Benefits of Going Ahead”, Turin: SOGES SpA for the European Commission (2011).

  98. 98.

    Bigsten and Tengstam, “The Aid Effectiveness Agenda”.

  99. 99.

    Riddell, “An Updated Assessment”, 26–28.

  100. 100.

    Riddell, 26–28.

  101. 101.

    Riddell, 26–28.

  102. 102.

    Riddell, 34.

  103. 103.

    Andrew Natsios, “The Clash of the Counter-Bureaucracy and Development”. Centre for Global Development, July 2010, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/118483/file_Natsios_Counterbureaucracy.pdf.

  104. 104.

    See Riddell, “An Updated Assessment”, 34–35 for more details on these studies.

  105. 105.

    Riddell, 22.

  106. 106.

    Monika Bauhr, Nicholas Charron, and Naghmeh Nasiritousi, “Does Corruption Cause Aid Fatigue? Public Opinion and the Aid-Corruption Paradox”, International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2013): 568–579.

  107. 107.

    Riddell, “An Updated Assessment”, 16–21.

  108. 108.

    Riddell, 16–21.

  109. 109.

    Cimadamore and Lange, “The Global Poverty Consensus Report”.

  110. 110.

    OECD, “Net ODA”.

  111. 111.

    Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 118–123.

  112. 112.

    Pogge, 118–123.

  113. 113.

    Pogge, 222–261.

  114. 114.

    James Tobin, “A Currency Transactions Tax, Why and How”, Open economies review 7, no. 1 (1996): 493–499. On the effectiveness of Tobin Tax and other similar transaction taxes, see Neil McCulloch and Grazia Pacillo, “The Tobin Tax: A Review of the Evidence”, IDS Research Reports 2011, no. 68 (2011): 1–77.

  115. 115.

    Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights.

  116. 116.

    Tom Campbell, “Poverty as a violation of Human Rights: Inhumanity or Injustice”, in Thomas Pogge ed. Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right–Who Owes What to the Very Poor(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 55–74.

  117. 117.

    James D. Fearon, “Governance and Civil War Onset”, World Bank, 2011, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/9123.

  118. 118.

    Chandy, Kato and Kharas, “From a Billion to Zero”, 12–15.

  119. 119.

    Chandy, Kato and Kharas, 12–15.

  120. 120.

    Gillian Brock, “Debating Brain Drain: An Overview”, Moral Philosophy and Politics 3, no. 1 (2016): 11.

  121. 121.

    Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford University Press, 2009), 198–207. She discusses the imperfect code in UK against actively recruiting health care professionals from developing countries. However, the potentially harmful effects of high skill migration can, and could be defensibly be eliminated by implementing various policies. It is important to note that Brock proposes that certain conditions such as regime legitimacy and urgent needs have to be satisfied for developing to regulate emigration. See Brock, “Debating Brain Drain”, and Gillian Brock and Michael Blake, Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration?(Oxford University Press, 2014) for some of these.

  122. 122.

    For the relationship between climate change and poverty, see Lael Brainard, Abigail Jones, and Nigel Purvis, eds. Climate Change and Global Poverty: A Billion Lives in the Balance? (Brookings Institution Press, 2009).

  123. 123.

    Andrew Darnton and Martin Kirk, Finding Frames: New Ways to Engage the UK Public in Global Poverty. (London: Bond, 2011).

  124. 124.

    OECD, “Aid for CSOs,” December 2015, https://www.oecd.org/dac/peer-reviews/Aid%20for%20CSOs%20in%202013%20_%20Dec%202015.pdf.

  125. 125.

    OECD, “DAC Aid at a Glance by Donor”, accessed 1 April 2019, https://public.tableau.com/views/AidAtAGlance/DACmembers?:embed=y&:display_count=no?&:showVizHome=no#1.

  126. 126.

    Cimadamore and Lange, “The Global Poverty Consensus Report,” 22.

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    Vincent Fang

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Fang, V. (2021). Extreme Poverty as a Problem for the Global North. In: From Charity to Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1433-0_2

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