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Mostrando postagens com marcador redução da pobreza. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador redução da pobreza. Mostrar todas as postagens

segunda-feira, 20 de fevereiro de 2023

A metamorfose do comunismo na China, livro de Xulio Rios - resenha de Rubén Darío Guzzetti

Un libro para leer, dialogar y reflexionar Rubén Darío Guzzetti

In PublicacionesSecciones by Xulio Ríos

https://politica-china.org/secciones/un-libro-para-leer-dialogar-y-reflexionar

El conjunto de generaciones que tenemos el privilegio de vivir estos tiempos estamos atravesados por una enorme cantidad de transformaciones excepcionalmente particulares agigantadas por su aceleración y profundidad. Desde los meteóricos cambios científicos y tecnológicos hasta los no menos importantes sociales y culturales, van transformando nuestra vida diaria haciendo muy difícil metabolizarlos.

Tratar de comprender que es lo que pasa, porque está ocurriendo lo que nos modifica nuestro entorno y a nosotros mismos, ha pasado de ser una opción a una necesidad y de esta a una obligación, aunque no sea mas que para sobrevivir.

La actualidad nos interpela a hacer horas extras como ciudadanos de este mundo.

Uno de los temas que ha sorprendido a la humanidad en el último medio siglo es la presencia internacional de un país que supo ser primera potencia en siglos anteriores pero que había caído en un abismo sometido por occidente. Sin lugar a dudas China sorprendió al mundo a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Casi todo lo que consumimos, en cualquier rincón del mundo, en alguna instancia de la cadena global de valor pasó por China.

Surgieron así cantidades de interpretaciones para dar explicación a infinidad de interrogantes que surgieron con el fenómeno chino:

¿Cómo fue posible que la población de uno de los dos países más poblados, que hasta hace 50 años se sostenía con dos comidas diarias a base de arroz hoy cuente con mas de 500 millones de personas en la categoría de clase media con la proyección de llevar esa cifra a 1000 millones en el año 2025?

¿Como hicieron para pasar de tener el 80% de analfabetos en 1949 a contar hoy con más de cien millones de universitarios?

¿Cómo hicieron para lograr poner fin a la pobreza extrema en noviembre del 2020 cuando los países mas desarrollados no lo logran y por el contrario esta crece?

¿Cómo fue que pasaron de tener un ingreso per cápita de U$S 180 en 1949 a 12.000, con grandes posibilidades de superar el piso de 12.600 y entrar a la categoría de país de altos ingresos, ¿en los próximos 2 años?

¿Cómo lograron pasar de ser una de las economías mas atrasadas a ser la segunda por PBI nominal y la primera en paridad de poder de compra, desplazando del podio a EE.UU., en 2014, después de 142 años?

En fin, podríamos sintetizar: ¿Cómo hicieron los chinos?, ¿qué hicieron los chinos?

El profesor Xulio Ríos, que dedicó una gran parte de su vida al estudio del proceso chino, aprovechando la celebración del primer centenario del Partido Comunista Chino, el 23 de julio de 2021, nos presentó una magistral obra que nos permite encontrar muchas respuestas al resurgimiento de la nación asiática.

El profesor Ríos, en las 435 páginas de su libro “La Metamorfosis del Comunismo en China”, no solo nos responde a muchos de estos interrogantes, sino que con una prosa entretenida y una objetividad envidiable nos refleja los distintos aportes de cada una de las cinco generaciones

de revolucionarios que gobernaron el país, los errores cometidos y la capacidad del partido para salir airoso de cada dificultad con una flexibilidad y capacidad política notable.

El profesor también pone luz sobre ciertas contradicciones en el seno de la organización como por ejemplo entre ideología y economía, entre izquierdistas-conservadores y occidentales-liberales, así como en la gestión de Xi Jinping el partido logró una síntesis virtuosa entre el yin y el yang, representativos de la cultura y la civilización milenaria, y la dialéctica del marxismo leninismo.

La obra también nos explica como el partido, a pesar de los obstáculos y equivocaciones nunca se apartó de sus objetivos fundacionales: revitalizar la nación china, luchar por su integridad territorial y trabajar incansablemente por la felicidad del pueblo.

Además, el profesor Ríos explica el ingreso de la RPCh en el escenario internacional y su propuesta de la Nueva Ruta de la Seda y de un futuro compartido para la humanidad.

Esta obra incursiona en evidenciar el conflicto actual entre las principales potencias y el proyecto estratégico de China en consonancia con su tradición e idiosincrasia.

Tampoco están ajenos en el libro los desafíos que enfrenta la actual dirigencia del partido, como se preparan, el fuerte intento de ir a una sociedad regida por leyes y con una profundización de la democracia entendida de una manera distinta a la occidental.

En fin, la obra del profesor Ríos es imprescindible para comprender un fenómeno muy particular, donde en Occidente estamos muy ajenos al mismo y lo solemos interpretar erróneamente con nuestras categorías.

Sin comprender qué está pasando en China es muy difícil entender qué pasa hoy en el mundo, cuáles son sus disputas y porqué ocurren. Para lograr dar algunos pasos en ese conocimiento es imprescindible leer “La Metamorfosis del Comunismo en China”, un manual de consulta permanente.

Uno de los libros que al lector lo deja reflexionando y con mucho más interés en el tema que al principio de su lectura.

Buenos Aires, 18 de Febrero de 2023

Rubén Darío Guzzetti

Director Instituto Argentino de Estudios Geopolíticos

Miembro del Instituto de Estudios de América Latina

Miembro del Centro y Formación Marxista Héctor Agosti


sábado, 16 de março de 2019

China: como eliminar a pobreza no espaco de uma geracao? - Alvin Powell (Harvard Gazette)

A China é um caso único na história econômica mundial, um caso excepcional na história tout court. Nunca antes na história da humanidade – digamos, nos últimos dez mil anos – uma sociedade, uma comunidade, já dotada de um Estado funcional, reduziu a pobreza de maneira tão rápida, tão espetacular, tão exemplar, quanto a China, ainda que preservando estruturas políticas autocráticas, de fato uma ditadura quase orwelliana, sem qualquer tolerância com a dissidência, mas já com alguma abertura na vida diária (desde que não se conteste o intolerante monopólio do poder político pelo Partido Comunista, cujo líder inicial, o delirante Mao, provocou dezenas de milhões de mortos durante sua tirania demencial). 
Mas, o sucesso econômico da China, mesmo que não possa ser replicado em outros países, merece, sim, ser estudado, pois outros países de base agrária atrasada podem aprender com a liberação econômica gradual sobre os mercados e as atividades econômicas de modo geral, o que pode ser visto a partir da tolerância demonstrada por Deng Xiaoping em relação à reapropriação das terras anteriormente pertencentes às comunas populares pelas famílias camponesas. O restabelecimento dos mercados com produtos privados e a aceitação dos investimentos diretos estrangeiros fizeram o resto, e aí o crescimento econômico passou a ser conduzido mais pelos capitalistas privados do que pelos burocratas e mandarins do Estado.
Ninguém pode replicar o caminho da China para o desenvolvimento, mas medidas adotadas de abertura econômica e de liberalização comercial podem, sim, ser repetidas por outros países.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Harvard's many research ties to that nation reflect broad engagement, as President Bacow visits

Nara Dillon's work in China seeks lessons from the country's successful battle against poverty that might be applied elsewhere.
Nara Dillon's work in China seeks lessons from the country's successful battle against poverty that might be applied elsewhere. 
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
China learned from other nations as it modernized its economy and embraced aspects of capitalism, but knowledge flows in both directions. Now, one Harvard scholar thinks there may be lessons for the rest of the world in a great Chinese success story: slashing poverty.
Between 1990 and 2015, China reduced extreme poverty by 94 percent, a change so dramatic and affecting so many people that it accounts for fully half of the global reduction in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $1.25 per day) over that time. In fact, according to senior lecturer on government Nara Dillon, the United Nation’s 2015 announcement that it had achieved its Millennium Development Goal of halving global extreme poverty would have been impossible without the gains in China.
Dillon said her research on China’s antipoverty programs may have limited value in developed nations where such extreme poverty is uncommon, but it likely has important implications in the developing world, where not only is extreme poverty common, but where the agricultural landscape of many small subsistence farms mirrors China’s.
“I think it’s most relevant to other developing countries where farmers are still a large part of the population,” Dillon said.
Dillon’s work is part of Harvard’s broad intellectual engagement with China that dates back to the 1800s, when famed plant collector Ernest H. Wilson began gathering samples of East Asian flora for the Arnold Arboretum and Chinese scholar Ko K’un-hua became the first instructor to teach the Chinese language here.
This week, President Larry Bacow becomes the latest Harvard leader to visit China. His trip, scheduled for spring break week, from Sunday through March 23, will take him to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing, where he’ll deliver a speech at Peking University. He will visit Japan after leaving China.
After Harvard’s initial engagement with China, the ties expanded through the 20th century as  early, tenuous connections strengthened and diversified into a robust scholarly and intellectual exchange that led to the founding, more than 60 years ago, of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Named for John King Fairbank, a founding figure of Chinese studies in the U.S., the center was the primary home for Chinese study at Harvard. Its director, Michael Szonyi, the Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History, said the scholarly connections between Harvard and China have overflowed the center’s walls and now encompass all of Harvard’s Schools and a wide array of disciplines.
The Fairbank Center’s role remains central, said Szonyi — who visited China 10 times last year — but in many cases it is one that coordinates and assists the work of scholars in the University’s disparate Schools.
Today, a search for “China” in the Harvard course catalog turns up more than 90 classes as diverse as Chinese language studies (through the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, founded in 1937), foreign policy, economics, art, cinema, sustainable development, and even “forbidden romance.” The 1,000 or so Chinese students studying at Harvard make up the School’s largest group from outside the U.S., and many Chinese scholars and faculty members teach and conduct research. Harvard students and faculty members travel regularly to China — the University’s most popular destination for travel abroad — and say that collaborations with Chinese researchers are critical if they are to advance work in a number of disciplines.
“In many fields, the best work is being done in China by Chinese researchers,” said Mark Elliott, Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs and the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History. “What I hear from a number of Harvard faculty is that in order to be at the top of the game, you have to make connections with Chinese scholars.”
In addition to the Fairbank Center and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard is home to the Harvard-Yenching Institute, which was established in 1928 and pioneered many  scholarly connections with China; the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment; the Harvard China Fund, which provides University-wide funding for China-related work, internships, and summer school; and the China programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, which foster policy-focused investigation and education, including executive education.
The University also has a permanent footprint in Shanghai with the Harvard Center Shanghai, sponsored by the China Fund and Harvard Business School, and runs — via the Harvard-China Project and with Tsinghua University colleagues — a long-running air-quality monitoring station north of Beijing, with a second in the works south of the city. The two stations will provide before-and-after samples for a comparative analysis of the air entering and leaving the metropolis.
Bacow’s trip comes at a time of problematic relations between the U.S. and China and also of heightened internal tension in the Asian giant, which has led to crackdowns that have affected everyone from academics to ethnic minorities.
Despite such tensions, it is important that engagement continue and that academic inquiry remain free of influence, Szonyi said. Relations between governments ebb and flow according to the foreign-policy vagaries of the moment. Over time, however, scholarly engagement not only bears fruit through new findings and discoveries, but it provides a stabilizing influence between nations and maintains communication lines at a subnational level, between scientific colleagues, between students who have become acquainted during summer programs, and between former mentors and students who may have gone on to hold positions of influence. In addition, Elliott, Szonyi, and other Harvard faculty emphasize the importance of continued engagement to support Chinese colleagues experiencing government pressures and to express concerns that domestic voices in China may be unable to express.
In recent years, Harvard’s China engagement has borne much fruit. Harvard researchers have spotlighted Coca-Cola’s outsized influence on obesity science and policy in China; examined the potential for military conflict between the two nations; run large-scale experiments aimed at improving health care delivery; launched a $3.75 million project to investigate energy development and climate change; documented the government’s millions of fake social media posts aimed at influencing public opinion; written a best-selling book about major Chinese philosophers; studied the slow emergence of private philanthropy; and published an award-winning translation of the complete works of Du Fu, considered one of China’s greatest poets.

Related

Dillon’s research is one example of the many lines of investigation now underway. Her work on China’s anti-poverty programs tracks much of their success to two major reforms in the 1980s. The first one abolished collective farms in favor of a system in which individual farmers hold long-term leases on  land and can keep the proceeds from any surplus sold in private markets. The change resulted in a surge in agricultural production and family incomes.
The second reform was a dramatic increase — as much as 91 percent in the case of some grains — in the prices the government pays for agricultural products. Those two reforms marked the end, Dillon said, of rural farm policies borrowed from the Stalinist Soviet Union that intentionally kept rural living standards low so that the economic surplus could be invested in urban and industrial development.
The lessons from the Chinese reforms, Dillon said, are probably most applicable in developing nations whose economic policies, albeit under a capitalist system, seek to encourage industrialization and urbanization over rural agriculture. From a poverty-reduction standpoint, Dillon said, the Chinese success was largely reached by doing the opposite: incentivizing and benefiting rural agriculture. And, with so many small farms across the Chinese countryside, the improvement in life for farmers meant a broad-based boost in the national standard of living. Ironically, she said, it is more common for rich nations to subsidize their agriculture industries.
“The broader lesson that countries can draw is to reduce the urban bias in their development policies,” Dillon said. “One of the ironies of these kinds of agricultural development policies is that rich countries subsidize farmers and poor countries don’t. They often make farmers subsidize urbanites.”

sexta-feira, 24 de abril de 2015

Eliminacao da Pobreza, ou simples subsidio ao consumo dos pobres? - Relatorio do Banco Mundial

De vez em quando leio notícias como essa, que figura abaixo: Brasil eliminou a pobreza, ou Brasil retirou tantas milhões de pessoas da pobreza extrema.
Eu me pergunto se as pessoas que escrevem essas coisas possuem uma exata noção das palavras, ou se os conceitos que elas utilizam encontram uma correspondência fiel na realidade.
Eliminar pobreza, para mim, significa tornar as pessoas não dependentes de qualquer forma de ajuda, ou seja, fazer com que elas disponham de meios próprios para sua manutenção e bem-estar.
Se essas pessoas dependem da transferência de recursos de alguém, ou de alguma institucão para sobreviver, então elas não deixaram a pobreza, e sim estão recebendo um subsídio para o seu consumo de bens essenciais, alguns até não essenciais, como parece ocorrer em certos casos (como o infeliz ministro das Comunicações, que promete televisão digital para todos os inscritos no Bolsa Família).
Se por acaso a transferência acabar, o que essas pessoas serão? De classe média? Prósperas? Independentes? Não, elas voltarão para a pobreza.
Então, não venham me dizer que a pobreza foi reduzida, ou eliminada.
Não, ela apenas foi mascarada por um ajutório para o consumo.
Não gosto de hipocrisia, ou de mentiras.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasil ha conseguido eliminar prácticamente la pobreza extrema y lo ha hecho más rápido que sus vecinos. La afirmación es del Banco Mundial, que en su último informe resalta que el número de brasileños que vive con menos de 2,5 dólares al día ha caído del 10% al 4% entre 2001 e 2013. El estudio, “Prosperidad Compartida y Erradicación de la Pobreza en América Latina y Caribe”, añade que el 60% de los brasileños aumentó su nivel de renta entre 1990 y 2009 y que Brasil es uno de los ejemplos más brillantes de reducción de pobreza en la última década.
“En total, 25 millones de personas dejaron de vivir en la pobreza (extrema o moderada), lo que representa una de cada dos personas que salió de la miseria en América Latina y en el Caribe de 1990 a 2009. Los autores explican que hasta 1999, los índices de extrema pobreza en Brasil y en el resto de la región eran parecidos y rondaban el 26%. Fue en 2012 cuando la institución comenzó a observar una mayor reducción en territorio brasileño: 9,6% ante el 12% del resto del continente.
La institución explica las causas de los buenos resultados, en un momento en el que un Brasil estancado batalla para no entrar en recesión. La primera es el crecimiento económico a partir de 2001, iniciado durante el mandato de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “bastante más estable que el registrado durante las dos décadas anteriores". En segundo lugar se alaban las políticas públicas que tienen como objetivo la erradicación de la pobreza, como la Bolsa Familia, que ofrece una modesta renta mensual a cambio de la escolarización de los hijos, o el Brasil sin Miseria, pensado para los más pobres. En último lugar se destaca el mercado de trabajo nacional, donde las tasas de empleo formales aumentaron un 60% y la evolución del salario mínimo, hoy de 295 dólares.
“El crecimiento, modesto aunque sostenido, se volvió más inclusivo gracias a políticas fuertemente enfocadas en la reducción de la pobreza y a favor de un mercado laboral fuerte”, afirma el informe, que advierte que el desafío todavía no ha acabado: “Si bien el país eliminó casi por completo la pobreza extrema en la última década, 18 millones de brasileños siguen viviendo en la pobreza, un tercio de la población no consiguió acceder a la clase media y se mantiene vulnerable economicamente”.

quinta-feira, 12 de junho de 2014

Propanda enganosa: chefe maxima do Ipea desmentida pelo Ipea sobre reducao da pobreza

PROPAGANDA ENGANOSA
Dilma inflou dado sobre a diminuição da miséria, diz IPEA
Cálculos do instituto apontam que 8,4 milhões de pessoas saíram da miséria no Brasil e não 36 milhões, como declarou a presidente
IPEA: número anunciado por Dilma repete o apurado em outra prestação de contas
Opinião e Notícia, 12 de junho, 2014

Para o Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA), a presidente Dilma Rousseff usou dados inflados sobre a redução da miséria no Brasil no pronunciamento sobre a Copa do Mundo, transmitido em cadeia nacional na última terça-feira, 10.
Segundo o IPEA, informações do próprio governo derrubam a afirmação da presidente de que “em uma década foram retirados 36 milhões de brasileiros da miséria”.
Conforme um estudo publicado pelo IPEA em outubro do ano passado, de 2002 a 2012, o número de pessoas na extrema pobreza caiu de 14,9 milhões para 6,5 milhões. Ou seja, uma queda de 8,4 milhões ao longo dos primeiros dez anos da administração petista.
Segundo o IPEA, o balanço comunicado pelo governo foi retirado de um cálculo hipotético sobre o programa Bolsa Família, feito em 2013, pelo Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social. Esse levantamento calcula apenas o número de beneficiários do programa, sem comparar a quantidade de pessoas que ainda vivem em situação de extrema miséria.
“Em 2011, havia 36 milhões de pessoas, beneficiárias do Bolsa Família, que estariam na miséria caso sobrevivessem apenas com sua renda familiar”, diz o balanço do Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social.



terça-feira, 14 de janeiro de 2014

Eliminando a pobreza, pelas vias corretas, que nao pode ser o distributivismo estatal

No primeiro parágrafo substantivo de meu artigo Verdades Não Convencionais (versão publicada no jornal O Estado de S. Paulo, em 8/01/2013, disponível aqui; versão completa, neste link), eu escrevi isto que vai transcrito em seguida, e que pretendo desenvolver em outro trabalho de maior amplitude, aliás, como todas as minhas outras "verdades não convencionais", no momento oportuno:

Programas para eliminar a pobreza terminam, de fato, consolidando-a. Almas generosas, espíritos socialistas, vocações distributivistas estão sempre querendo corrigir as desigualdades sociais por meio de algum programa de transferência de renda em grande escala. Não existe, na história econômica mundial, exemplos de eliminação da pobreza via transferências governamentais. Existem, sim, trajetórias bem sucedidas de redução da pobreza e para menores níveis de desigualdade via qualificação da mão-de-obra mediante a educação de qualidade. Empregos e renda por meio dos mercados ainda é a melhor forma inventada pela civilização para a criação da prosperidade, o que não quer dizer supressão da riqueza de alguns, como pretendem adeptos do imposto sobre as grandes fortunas. O Brasil deve ser o único país no mundo que mantém um quarto da sua população oficialmente na assistência pública. Isso é normal?

De fato não é normal, mas dentro em pouco vou ser obrigado a me corrigir, pois o curral eleitoral do governo dos companheiros não para de crescer; dentro em pouco não será mais um quarto e sim um terço da população.
Também já postei aqui algumas matérias sobre o cinquentenário -- aliás pouco comemorado pelo governo Obama, e bem mais lembrado pelos jornalistas, que adoram essas datas redondas -- inclusive porque a avaliação que se faz de todo o aparato criado pelos programas iniciados por Lyndon Johnson (e continuados sob diversas formas, e também ampliados, por outros presidentes, inclusive teoricamente conservadores, como Nixon, que na verdade era um oportunista demagogo e um grande mentiroso, a despeito de ser um realista em política externa) é muito ambígua. Alguns dizem que não serviu para nada, ou apenas para acomodar pobres e pretos na assistência pública; outros dizem que sem eles, a situação dos pobres hoje seria pior, em número e extensão.
Não acredito: todos os países do capitalismo avançado, todas as sociedades de economias de mercado reduziram a pobreza em volumes significativos, e nem todas elas introduziram programas distributivistas muito amplos, algumas apenas continuaram fazendo o que sempre fizeram líderes responsáveis: taxando proporcionalmente mais os mais ricos e provendo serviços públicos de qualidade, geralmente de maneira indireta (saúde, educação, saneamento e infraestrutura, oportunidades iguais para todos disputarem emprego e renda nos mercados).
Ou seja, o fato de que a pobreza só tenha diminuído um pouco, nos EUA, como indicam as matérias abaixo, não quer dizer que isso se deu em função dos programas de Lyndon Johnson: pode ter sido a marcha natural da sociedade de mercado, que sempre cria mais riqueza do que qualquer sistema mais ou menos estatal que se conheça. E pode ser, também, que a pobreza teria diminuído mais rápido SE NÃO fossem esses programas, que podem ter acomodado os pobres na assistência pública, provocado certo desleixo com a gravidez adolescente e outros fatores que sabemos estar nos fundamentos da pobreza americana persistente e atual.
Por isso volto ao meu argumento acima: programas para, supostamente, eliminar a pobreza, acabam fixando-a em patamares inaceitáveis.
É exatamente o que está acontecendo no Brasil: não pensem que os programas do governo eliminaram a pobreza. Isso não; eles apenas estão subsidiando o consumo dos pobres.
Se por acaso, o destino, a desgraça, uma crise feia, ou um líder "malvado" terminarem com a esmola estatal, todo esse pessoal volta para a pobreza.
Ou então vai trabalhar mais um pouco, o que não mata ninguém e é até saudável.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Fighting Poverty the Right Way

Fifty years after President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty," the percentage of Americans living below the official poverty line is only slightly lower than in 1964. Progressive writer Sasha Abramsky urges President Obama to commemorate the anniversary by redoubling efforts to improve the lot of the poorest Americans in ways that avoid the problems that have plagued antipoverty programs since the 1960s. But as Independent Institute Communications Counsel K. Lloyd Billingsley notes in Forbes, Abramsky recommends paying for the War on Poverty Mark II via a host of tax hikes on upper-income taxpayers--essentially the same measures that helped make the original War on Poverty counterproductive by impeding economic growth and opportunity. READ MORE

50 Years Later, LBJ's 'War on Poverty' Has Proven a Total Failure, by K. Lloyd Billingsley (Forbes, 1/10/14)

Five Myths About Inequality, by John C. Goodman (Townhall, 1/4/14)

domingo, 5 de janeiro de 2014

Pobreza e desigualdade: o debate continua nos EUA, 50 depois da GreatSociety (NYT)

Seria a desigualdade a questão crucial do nosso tempo, como pretende o presidente Obama?
Não creio. Os que assim afirmam acreditam que a pobreza resulta da desigualdade de rendas, e daí começam a propor esquemas redistributivos via Estado, que não são nem eficientes, nem isentos de outras deformações, como exemplica esta matéria sobre o meio século decorrido desde a implantação da Great Society por Lyndon Johnson, que alinhou os EUA aos esquemas mais redistributivos europeus.
O problema crucial, para mim, não é desigualdade distributiva ao nível da renda, e sim a desigualdade de oportunidades que deriva da pouca educação e de estruturas familiares inadequadas.
O Estado deve apenas oferecer educação de qualidade, o que implica igualmente promover valores familiares, edeixar para o setor privado a tarefa de criação de renda e riqueza via mercado, que é mais suscetível de criar mais empregos de qualidade do que os programas ineficientes do governo.
O debate continua, mas apenas para colocar minha posição proclamo abertamente minha preferência por mais mercado, e não mais governo.
É uma ilusão completa achar que o Bolsa Família e programas associados e complementares vão eliminar a pobreza e a desigualdade no Brasil. Não vão: eles apenas subsidiam o consumo dos pobres, que sem isso estariam na situação anterior, ou provavelnente pior, se por acaso a esmola governamental acabar, pois eles já deixaram outras estratégias de sobrevivência para se acomodarem no assistencialismo estatal.
Digam sinceramente: vocês acham normal um país ter UM QUARTO da população na assistência pública?
Eu não acho: essa é a confissão de um fracasso, não o sucesso de um conceito de nação.
O Brasil já está em decadência e ainda não se deu conta disso.
Somos uma nação fracassada e condenada a um lento declínio. 
Infelizmente, tudo isso por falta de estadistas ditados de visão. Não temos elites esclarecidas, basta ver os que se nos oferecem em eleições, e a total indigência intelectual de suas propostas.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

WASHINGTON MEMO

50 Years Later, War on Poverty Is a Mixed Bag



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WASHINGTON — To many Americans, the war on poverty declared 50 years ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson has largely failed. The poverty rate has fallen only to 15 percent from 19 percent in two generations, and 46 million Americans live in households where the government considers their income scarcely adequate.
George Tames/The New York Times
President Johnson touring impoverished areas in 1964.
Multimedia
Yuri Gripas/Reuters
Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin is among the conservatives who have looked at poverty statistics more skeptically.
But looked at a different way, the federal government has succeeded in preventing the poverty rate from climbing far higher. There is broad consensus that the social welfare programs created since the New Deal have hugely improved living conditions for low-income Americans. At the same time, in recent decades, most of the gains from the private economy have gone to those at the top of the income ladder.
Half a century after Mr. Johnson’s now-famed State of the Union address, the debate over the government’s role in creating opportunity and ending deprivation has flared anew, with inequality as acute as it was in the Roaring Twenties and the ranks of the poor and near-poor at record highs. Programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps are keeping millions of families afloat. Republicans have sought to cut both programs, an illustration of the intense disagreement between the two political parties over the best solutions for bringing down the poverty rate as quickly as possible, or eliminating it.
For poverty to decrease, “the low-wage labor market needs to improve,” James P. Ziliak of the University of Kentucky said. “We need strong economic growth with gains widely distributed. If the private labor market won’t step up to the plate, we’re going to have to strengthen programs to help these people get by and survive.”
In Washington, President Obama has called inequality the “defining challenge of our time.” To that end, he intends to urge states to expand their Medicaid programs to poor, childless adults, and is pushing for an increase in the minimum wage and funding for early-childhood programs.
But conservatives, like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, have looked at the poverty statistics more skeptically, contending that the government has misspent its safety-net money and needs to focus less on support and more on economic and job opportunities.
“The nation should face up to two facts: poverty rates are too high, especially among children, and spending money on government means-tested programs is at best a partial solution,” Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution wrote in an assessment of the shortfalls on the war on poverty. Washington already spends enough on antipoverty programs to lift all Americans out of poverty, he said. “To mount an effective war against poverty,” he added, “we need changes in the personal decisions of more young Americans.”
Still, a broad range of researchers interviewed by The New York Times stressed the improvement in the lives of low-income Americans since Mr. Johnson started his crusade. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, millions of women have entered the work force, malnutrition has all but disappeared. After all, when Mr. Johnson announced his campaign, parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing.
Many economists argue that the official poverty rate grossly understates the impact of government programs. The headline poverty rate counts only cash income, not the value of in-kind benefits like food stamps. A fuller accounting suggests the poverty rate has dropped to 16 percent today, from 26 percent in the late 1960s, economists say.
But high rates of poverty — measured by both the official government yardstick and the alternatives that many economists prefer — have remained a remarkably persistent feature of American society. About four in 10 black children live in poverty; for Hispanic children, that figure is about three in 10. According to one recent study, as of mid-2011, in any given month, 1.7 million households were living on cash income of less than $2 a person a day, with the prevalence of the kind of deep poverty commonly associated with developing nations increasing since the mid-1990s.
Both economic and sociological trends help explain why so many children and adults remain poor, even putting the effects of the recession aside. More parents are raising a child alone, with more infants born out of wedlock. High incarceration rates, especially among black men, keep many families apart. About 30 percent of single mothers live in poverty.
In some cases, government programs have helped fewer families because of program changes and budget cuts, researchers said. For instance, the 1996 Clinton-era welfare overhaul drastically cut the cash assistance available to needy families, often ones headed by single mothers.
“As of 1996, we expected single mothers to go to work,” Professor Ziliak said. “But if they’re shelling out most of their weekly pay in the form of child care, they can’t make sense of doing it.”
The more important driver of the still-high poverty rate, researchers said, is the poor state of the labor market for low-wage workers and spiraling inequality. Over the last 30 years, growth has generally failed to translate into income gains for workers — even as the American labor force has become better educated and more skilled. About 40 percent of low-wage workers have attended or completed college, and 80 percent have completed high school.
Economists remain sharply divided on the reasons, with technological change, globalization, the decline of labor unions and the falling value of the minimum wage often cited as major factors. But with real incomes for a vast number of middle-class and low-wage workers in decline, safety-net programs have become more instrumental in keeping families’ heads above water.
The earned-income tax credit, for instance, has increased employment among single mothers and kept six million Americans above the poverty line in 2011. Food stamps, formally known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, kept four million Americans out of poverty in 2011.
Above all, the government has proved most successful in aiding the elderly through the New Deal-era Social Security program and the creation of Medicare in the 1960s. The poverty rate among older Americans fell to just 9 percent in 2012 from 35 percent in 1959.
But for working-age households, both conservatives and liberals agree that government transfer programs alone cannot eliminate poverty. The answer, the White House has said, is in trying to improve households’ earnings before tax and transfer programs take effect.
“Going forward, the biggest potential gains that could be made on poverty would be in raising market incomes,” said Jason Furman, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “In the short run, that means things like the minimum wage, and in the long run, things like early education.”
If Congress approved a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from its current level of $7.25, it would reduce the poverty rate of working-age Americans by 1.7 percentage points, lifting about five million people out of poverty, according toresearch by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
But in the meantime, the greatest hope for poorer Americans would be a stronger economic recovery that brought the unemployment rate down from its current level of 7 percent and drew more people into the work force. The poverty rate for full-time workers is just 3 percent. For those not working, it is 33 percent.


sexta-feira, 28 de junho de 2013

Deepak Lal: Poverty and Progress (book review)

A hard look at jaded truths

Noted economist Deepak Lal provides a thoughtful counter-analysis of current notions about global poverty and global warming
Business Standard, Friday, June 28, 2013
Poverty and  and  about Global Poverty
Deepak Lal
250 pages; $24.95
Cato Institute, 2013
There are few original thinkers. They do not necessarily follow the current fashions and what they write sometimes appears incredible, outrageous, brilliant or even thoughtless. Agree with them or not, they have to be heard and read.  is one such person. To all and sundry, take a day or two off, turn off your cell phone and have fun, book in hand and mind guided by Mr Lal to wander across centuries and countries.

We have forgotten in India that an author can be anti-welfare and still have a soft heart towards the underprivileged; he can be critical of foreign aid and still be pro-globalisation; he can be critical of overuse of statistics and yet be highly quantitative in his approach to analysis. The leftists will find much here to criticise economic-liberals; the nationalists will find many arguments against interacting with the western world; and those on the right wing will find much that is wrong with the left and left-of-centre approach to development. And if you are none of the above, even better: Mr Lal will show you many interesting ways to look at the world.

Chapter 1 introduces and shares data on GDP for the past 2,000 years. More interesting is the brief history of the world, birth of capitalism and how countries achieved the turning point. The chapter is an interesting take on how and when various growth surges occurred and, interlinked with that,  reduction across the globe. He borrows data extensively from other sources to make a simple yet powerful point. Globally, poverty in terms of the number of poor has fallen more in an era in which there has been greater economic liberalism than when the government was meddling.

Chapter 2 brings in life expectancy, mortality, nutrition and literacy as other measures of well-being and shows that all have been improving consistently. This is obvious; if poverty is falling, other correlates should be improving. And since stuff like education is an input into better incomes, it should obviously improve faster than poverty. It would have been worth writing about if these indicators had worsened, but thankfully that’s not the case. There was no reason for this chapter, but in this day of Millennium Development Goals even original thinkers have to pay service to World Bank-type indicators.  Or … is it the soft heart peeping through Mr Lal’s hard-headed discourse? I wonder.

In Chapter 3, he shows that poverty has three components: structural, which is best addressed by growth; destitution, which is fairly limited; and conjunctural. I looked up Wikipedia and conjunctural means circumstantial — famine and suchlike. Mr Lal’s conjecture is that conjunctural poverty can only be addressed by income transfers that could flow from private efforts, such as charity or intra-family transfers; and that these have been replaced by public transfers in western societies.

This is a very important distinction, and policy makers frequently lose sight of it. Welfare can be the result of co-operative action both through the state and also without significant state involvement, and the latter can have insurance-like characteristics. The recommendations for welfare by the state are even more instigative than the preceding analysis: first option — do nothing; second — fund but don’t provide directly; third — involve private agents with superior <i> local <p> knowledge. And, finally, in the same vein, “ …foreign aid … is an idea whose time has gone”.

Chapter 4 ventures into the political economy space. Institutions and cultural arguments of developments are examined from a historical perspective. Mr Lal looks at how institutions and norms arise as a result of economic and geographic conditions and how they, in turn, impact long-term development outcomes. A structured model clearly exists in the author’s mind and he goes to some lengths to define its contours. The subject, however, is too diverse and the expanse of Mr Lal’s vision too wide for justice to be done in a few pages (17 to be precise). The claim that globalisation and liberal economic policies are the preferred route irrespective of the political economy comes as something of an anti-climax.

Chapter 5 replays the arguments that, internationally, as in India, there appears to be a vested interest in overplaying the extent of poverty. The underlying issue is that there is no perfect normative way of defining poverty. Also, as aggregate living standards improve, our notion of who is poor and who is not also changes.

But the more serious problem arises when the development sector, which includes but is not limited to the World Bank, indulges in poor-quality data work to bring out estimates that consistently show significantly higher levels of poverty. Mr Lal is not the first to claim this. Surjit Bhalla is another member of a small group of economists that is finding such inconsistencies when it looks under the woodwork.

Chapter 6 looks at a range of other misuses of quantitative techniques by economists. Mr Lal describes, quite convincingly, a host of conditions in which methods that appear “scientific” and objective fall flat when seen in the context of the underlying economic conditions. The point is that economics is a social “science” and economic conditions deal with human interactions and not physical phenomena.

Human beings organise and react to each other in different ways that do not neatly fit into the preconditions required for many of the quantitative techniques that even well-trained economists use. The result is that claims to statistically significant results out of objective scientific econometric analysis often turn out to be nothing but mumbo jumbo. A better and more difficult approach is analytical econometric history that involves placing all the available evidence and finding a plausible story that best fits the facts.

There were two takeaways for me. First, analyses of what policies work and what don’t – and which ones are desirable and which are not – cannot be determined by a simple regression analysis; they require a deep understanding of the historical antecedents and underlying conditions that are generating the data (the institutions and so on). And good analysis would first look into these aspects. Second –  this is a rather strong statement to make and suggests that economists need to be far more humble than we are –  what we can do at best is make educated guesses given the availability of limited evidence. Or did I get this part wrong? Mr Lal does not stop there.

Chapter 7 continues with the blitzkrieg . Many issues are taken up with one common thread: policy recommendations that call for greater state intervention in the economy. In each case, Mr Lal shows how bad economic judgement, deliberate misuse of data or poor quantitative analysis are used to show what is not necessarily correct. Hence, the Taiwan and South Korea manufacturing success was not necessarily because of state intervention (which may, in fact, have harmed them). Or the co-ordination failure and poverty trap arguments used to aid African countries were flawed and consequently did not help the receiver countries. This is the most technical of all chapters and perhaps the only one in which Deepak Lal the economist dominates Deepak Lal the rational commentator.

Chapter 8 studies microeconomic issues such as project appraisal, experimentation or randomised controlled trials (for which he has some disrespect); delves into the question of why surveys show the poor to be happier than we would otherwise believe, and take actions unlike those we would expect; and finally discusses the informal sector and microfinance. This is a “fun” chapter. Many uncommon insights, titbits, facts and factoids come together in a range of day-to-day economic policy.

Chapter 9 is about Africa and is rather dated, because many parts of Africa appear to have spontaneously shifted out of the low-growth, dictatorial-exploitation trap. And despite the new-found interest by the western and now eastern world (China), it is evident that Africa is no longer as helpless as was being made out in the past. Mr Lal, however, cautions: if you care about Africa, stay away from giving it aid. In other words, trade with it, don’t aid it.

Chapter 10 is the last chapter – though a concluding note follows it – and it focuses on .  Knowing Mr Lal’s penchant, I was expecting the obvious criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) type of work. And, boy, he does not disappoint! But first, the perspective. One, a large part of the CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases will be from India and China, and eventually this will be far more than the developed countries, given their much larger populations.

So, policies curtailing their emission will adversely impact their growth. Two, he accepts that there is warming and there are greater greenhouse gases such as CO2 floating around (though he shows data that reveal some cooling in the 2000s). Three, he does not accept the correlation between CO2 and global warming. Instead, he argues that it may be the warming that is causing the rise in CO2 levels! It is possible, of course. After all, the Himalayan glacier story was faked by the IPCC and the veracity of the hockey stick graph showing rising temperatures has also been questioned. Agree or not, questioning what goes as gospel truth comes naturally to Mr Lal, and he forces you into this exciting and irreverent world.

Deepak Lal dislikes too much government. He dislikes even more quantitative work that is either inherently biased or not thought through well enough. He studies such work and shows you how to think through such flaws. He does not mince his words, hides nothing, and writes in a clear, unambiguous manner. For each of these reasons, the book is a good read. I will strongly encourage those interested in economic policy and, most important of all, students of economics to read this, and political entities across the economic spectrum and libraries to stock it.

The reviewer is director, Indicus Analytics.

terça-feira, 4 de junho de 2013

Acabando com a pobreza: os antiglobalizadores vao ficar decepcionados - The Economist

Os antiglobalizadores precisam que existam pobres no mundo. Do contrário como é que eles vão acusar o capitalismo de causar tanta miséria, tanto desemprego, tantas desgraças, como guerras, fome, epidemias, verrugas, injustiças, falta de aperitivo antes do almoço e outras desgraças mais?
Eles vão ficar infelizes os altermundialistas: reduzindo a pobreza no mundo, sem mudança de sistema, metade das suas acusações caem por terra.
Que terrível ser atropelado pela realidade, não é mesmo?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Poverty

Not always with us

The world has an astonishing chance to take a billion people out of extreme poverty by 2030

IN SEPTEMBER 2000 the heads of 147 governments pledged that they would halve the proportion of people on the Earth living in the direst poverty by 2015, using the poverty rate in 1990 as a baseline. It was the first of a litany of worthy aims enshrined in the United Nations “millennium development goals” (MDGs). Many of these aims—such as cutting maternal mortality by three quarters and child mortality by two thirds—have not been met. But the goal of halving poverty has been. Indeed, it was achieved five years early.
In 1990, 43% of the population of developing countries lived in extreme poverty (then defined as subsisting on $1 a day); the absolute number was 1.9 billion people. By 2000 the proportion was down to a third. By 2010 it was 21% (or 1.2 billion; the poverty line was then $1.25, the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines in 2005 prices, adjusted for differences in purchasing power). The global poverty rate had been cut in half in 20 years.
That raised an obvious question. If extreme poverty could be halved in the past two decades, why should the other half not be got rid of in the next two? If 21% was possible in 2010, why not 1% in 2030?
Why not indeed? In April at a press conference during the spring meeting of the international financial institutions in Washington, DC, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, scrawled the figure “2030” on a sheet of paper, held it up and announced, “This is it. This is the global target to end poverty.” He was echoing Barack Obama who, in February, promised that “the United States will join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades.”
This week, that target takes its first step towards formal endorsement as an aim of policy round the world. The leaders of Britain, Indonesia and Liberia are due to recommend to the UN a list of post-2015 MDGs. It will be headed by a promise to end extreme poverty by 2030.
There is a lot of debate about what exactly counts as poverty and how best to measure it. But by any measure, the eradication of $1.25-a-day poverty would be an astonishing achievement. Throughout history, dire poverty has been a basic condition of the mass of mankind. Thomas Malthus, a British clergyman who founded the science of demography, wrote in 1798 that it was impossible for people to “feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and [their] families” and that “no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind.” For most countries, poverty was not even a problem; it was a plain, unchangeable fact.
To eradicate extreme poverty would also be remarkable given the number of occasions when politicians have promised to achieve the goal and failed. “We do have an historic opportunity this year to make poverty history,” said Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister in 2005. Three years before that, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president said that “for the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty.” Going further back: “For the first time in our history,” said Lyndon Johnson, “it is possible to conquer poverty.” That was in 1964. Much will have to change if Mr Kim’s piece of paper is not to become one more empty promise.
So how realistic is it to think the world can end extreme poverty in a generation? To meet its target would mean maintaining the annual one-percentage-point cut in the poverty rate achieved in 1990-2010 for another 20 years. That would be hard. It will be more difficult to rescue the second billion from poverty than it was the first. Yet it can be done. The world has not only cut poverty a lot but also learned much about how to do it. Poverty can be reduced, albeit not to zero. But a lot will have to go right if that is to happen.
Growth Decreases Poverty
In 1990-2010 the driving force behind the reduction of worldwide poverty was growth. Over the past decade, developing countries have boosted their GDP about 6% a year—1.5 points more than in 1960-90. This happened despite the worst worldwide economic crisis since the 1930s. The three regions with the largest numbers of poor people all registered strong gains in GDP after the recession: at 8% a year in East Asia; 7% in South Asia; 5% in Africa. As a rough guide, every 1% increase in GDP per head reduces poverty by around 1.7%.
GDP, though, is not necessarily the best measure of living standards and poverty reduction. It is usually better to look at household consumption based on surveys. Martin Ravallion, until recently the World Bank’s head of research, took 900 such surveys in 125 developing countries. These show, he calculates, that consumption in developing countries has grown by just under 2% a year since 1980. But there has been a sharp increase since 2000. Before that, annual growth was 0.9%; after it, the rate leapt to 4.3%.
Growth alone does not guarantee less poverty. Income distribution matters, too. One estimate found that two thirds of the fall in poverty was the result of growth; one-third came from greater equality. More equal countries cut poverty further and faster than unequal ones. Mr Ravallion reckons that a 1% increase in incomes cut poverty by 0.6% in the most unequal countries but by 4.3% in the most equal ones.
The country that cut poverty the most was China, which in 1980 had the largest number of poor people anywhere. China saw a huge increase in income inequality—but even more growth. Between 1981 and 2010 it lifted a stunning 680m people out poverty—more than the entire current population of Latin America. This cut its poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to about 10% now. China alone accounts for around three quarters of the world’s total decline in extreme poverty over the past 30 years.
What is less often realised is that the recent story of poverty reduction has not been all about China. Between 1980 and 2000 growth in developing countries outside the Middle Kingdom was 0.6% a year. From 2000 to 2010 the rate rose to 3.8%—similar to the pattern if you include China. Mr Ravallion calculates that the acceleration in growth outside China since 2000 has cut the number of people in extreme poverty by 280m.
Can this continue? And if it does, will it eradicate extreme poverty by 2030?
To keep poverty reduction going, growth would have to be maintained at something like its current rate. Most forecasters do expect that to happen, though problems in Europe could spill over and damage the global economy. Such long-range forecasts are inevitably unreliable but two broad trends make an optimistic account somewhat plausible. One is that fast-growing developing countries are trading more with each other, making them more resilient than they used to be to shocks from the rich world. The other trend is that the two parts of the world with the largest numbers of poor people, India and Africa, are seeing an expansion of their working-age populations relative to the numbers of dependent children and old people. Even so, countries potentially face a problem of diminishing returns which could make progress at the second stage slower than at the first.
There is no sign so far that returns are in fact diminishing. The poverty rate has fallen at a robust one percentage point a year over the past 30 years—and there has been no tailing off since 2005. But diminishing returns could occur for two reasons. When poverty within a country falls to very low levels, the few remaining poor are the hardest to reach. And, globally, as more people in countries such as China become middle class, poverty will become concentrated in fragile or failing states which have seen little poverty reduction to date.
The sweetest spot
In a study for the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC, Laurence Chandy, Natasha Ledlie and Veronika Penciakova look at the distribution of consumption (how many people consume $1 a day, $2 a day and so on) in developing countries. They show how it has changed over time, and how it might change in future. Plotted on a chart, the distribution looks like a fireman’s helmet, with a peak in front and a long tail behind. In 1990 there were hardly any people with no income at all, then a peak just below the poverty line and then a long tail of richer folk extending off to the right (see chart 2).
As countries get richer, the helmet moves to the right, reflecting the growth in household consumption. The faster the rate, the farther to the right the line moves, so the strong 4.3% annual growth in consumption since 2000 has pushed the line a good distance rightward.
But the shape of the line also matters. The chart shows that in 1990 and 2000, the peak was positioned slightly to the left of the poverty line. As the shape moved to the right, it took a section of the peak to the other side of the poverty mark. This represents the surge of people who escaped poverty in 1990-2010.
At the moment the world is at a unique sweet spot. More people are living at $1.25 than at any other level of consumption. This means growth will result in more people moving across the international poverty line than across any other level of consumption. This is a big reason why growth is still producing big falls in poverty.
But as countries continue to grow, and as the line continues to be pulled to the right, things start to change. Now, the peak begins to flatten. In 2010, according to Mr Chandy, there were 85m people living at or just below the poverty line (at a consumption level between $1.20 and $1.25 a day). If poverty falls at its trend rate, the number of people living at $1.20-1.25 a day will also fall: to 56m in 2020 and 28m in 2030.
This is good news, of course: there will be fewer poor people. But it means the rate of poverty reduction must slow down, even if consumption continues to grow fast. As Mr Chandy says, unless growth goes through the roof, “it is not possible to maintain the trend rate of poverty reduction with so many fewer individuals ready to cross the line.”
So what impact, in practice, might diminishing returns have? Messrs Chandy and Ravallion try to answer that by calculating what different rates of household consumption mean for poverty reduction and how much household income would have to grow to eradicate extreme poverty.
Mr Ravallion provides an optimistic projection. If developing countries were to maintain their post-2000 performance, he says, then the number of extremely poor people in the world would fall from 1.2 billion in 2010 to just 200m in 2027.
This would be a remarkable achievement. It took 20 years to reduce the number of absolutely poor people from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 1.2 billion in 2010 (a fall of less than half). Mr Ravallion’s projection would lift a billion people out of poverty in 17 years and implies almost halving the number in just ten (from 2012 to 2022).
But even this projection does not get to zero poverty. The figure of 200m poor implies a poverty rate of just over 3%. To get to zero would require something even more impressive. Mr Ravallion estimates that to reach a 1% poverty rate by 2027 would require a surge in household consumption of 7.6% a year—an unrealistically high level.
Drops of good cheer
Mr Chandy and his co-authors get similar results. They take a projection of falling poverty based on forecasts of consumption by the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company. If growth were two points better than forecast, then the poverty rate would be just over 3%; if two points worse, it would be almost 10%—a big disappointment. If income distribution within countries gets progressively better or worse (ie, if the poorest 40% do better or worse than the top 10%), then the range of outcomes would be the same as if growth were higher or lower. And if you combine all these variables, then the range is wide indeed, from a miserable 15% poverty rate (lower growth, more inequality) to a stunning 1.4% (higher growth, less inequality).
Two conclusions emerge from these exercises. First, the range of outcomes is wide, implying that prospects for eradicating poverty are uncertain. The range is also not symmetrical, suggesting the risk of failure is greater than the hope of success. It is also noticeable that no one is forecasting zero poverty. If that were taken as the post-2015 target, then it would be missed. However, reducing the rate to 3% would lift a billion people out of poverty and that would be remarkable enough. In the best case, the global poverty rate falls to a little over 1%, or just 70m people. That would be astonishing. To get to these levels, the studies suggest, you cannot rely on boosting growth or improving income inequality alone. You need both.
Second, the geography of poverty will be transformed. China passed the point years ago where it had more citizens above the poverty line than below it. By 2020 there will be hardly any Chinese left consuming less than $1.25 a day: everyone will have escaped poverty. China wrote the first chapter of the book of poverty reduction but that chapter is all but finished.
The next will be about India. India mirrors the developing world as a whole: growth will push a wave of Indians through the $1.25 barrier over the next decade (see chart 3). The subcontinent could generate the largest gains in poverty reduction in the next decade (which is why the current Indian slowdown is worrying). After that, though, continued growth will benefit relatively comfortable Indians more than poor ones.
The last chapter will be about Africa. Only in sub-Saharan Africa will there be large numbers of people below the poverty line. Unfortunately they are currently too far below it. The average consumption of Africa’s poorest people is only about 70 cents a day—barely more than it was 20 years ago. In the six poorest countries it falls to only 50 cents a day. The continent has made big strides during the past decade. But even 20 more years of such progress will not move the remaining millions out of poverty. At current growth rates, a quarter of Africans will still be consuming less than $1.25 a day in 2030. The disproportionate falls in Africa’s poverty rate will not happen until after that date.
Make Bono history
Deng wrote chapter one
The record of poverty reduction has profound implications for aid. One of the main purposes of setting development goals was to give donors a wish list and persuade them to put more resources into the items on the list. This may have helped in some areas but it is hard to argue that aid had much to do with halving poverty. Much of the fall occurred in China, which ignored the MDGs. At best, aid and the MDGs were marginal.
The changing geography of poverty will pose different aid problems over the next 20 years. According to Mr Chandy, by 2030 nearly two-thirds of the world’s poor will be living in states now deemed “fragile” (like the Congo and Somalia). Much of the rest will be in middle-income countries. This poses a double dilemma for donors: middle-income countries do not really need aid, while fragile states cannot use it properly. A dramatic fall in poverty requires rethinking official assistance.
Yet all the problems of aid, Africa and the intractability of the final billion do not mask the big point about poverty reduction: it has been a hugely positive story and could become even more so. As a social problem, poverty has been transformed. Thanks partly to new technology, the poor are no longer an undifferentiated mass. Identification schemes are becoming large enough—India has issued hundreds of millions of biometric smart cards—that countries are coming to know their poor literally by name. That in turn enables social programmes to be better targeted, studied and improved. Conditional cash-transfer schemes like Mexico’s Oportunidades and Brazil’s Bolsa Família have all but eradicated extreme poverty in those countries.
As the numbers of poor fall further, not only will the targets become fewer, but the cost of helping them will fall to almost trivial levels; it would cost perhaps $50m a day* to bring 200m people up above the poverty line. Of course, there will be other forms of poverty; the problems of some countries and places will remain intractable and may well require different policies; and $1.26 a day is still a tiny amount.
But something fundamental will have shifted. Poverty used to be a reflection of scarcity. Now it is a problem of identification, targeting and distribution. And that is a problem that can be solved.
Correction: The original version of this article said that it would cost $50m a year to bring 200m people above the poverty line. $50m is in fact the daily figure. The annual figure is $18.3 billion. This was corrected on May 31st 2013.