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IN HIS inaugural address in 1949 Harry Truman said that \u201cmore than half the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of those people.\u201d It has taken much longer than Truman hoped, but the world has lately been making extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2010, their number fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries, from 43% to 21%\u2014a reduction of almost 1 billion people.
\nNow the world has a serious chance to redeem Truman\u2019s pledge to lift the least fortunate. Of the 7 billion people alive on the planet, 1.1 billion subsist below the internationally accepted extreme-poverty line of $1.25 a day. Starting this week and continuing over the next year or so, the UN\u2019s usual Who\u2019s Who of politicians and officials from governments and international agencies will meet to draw up a new list of targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were set in September 2000 and expire in 2015. Governments should adopt as their main new goal the aim of reducing by another billion the number of people in extreme poverty by 2030.<\/p>\n
Take a bow, capitalism<\/strong> Markets v misery<\/strong> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years. The world should aim to do the same again Jun 1st 2013\u00a0|\u00a0From the print edition IN HIS inaugural address in 1949 Harry Truman said that \u201cmore than half the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery. For the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-pauvrete"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1449,"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions\/1449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bliss.pro\/fracture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNobody in the developed world comes remotely close to the poverty level that $1.25 a day represents. America\u2019s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty\u2019s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries\u2019 own poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short. They lack not just education, health care, proper clothing and shelter\u2014which most people in most of the world take for granted\u2014but even enough food for physical and mental health. Raising people above that level of wretchedness is not a sufficient ambition for a prosperous planet, but it is a necessary one.
\nThe world\u2019s achievement in the field of poverty reduction is, by almost any measure, impressive. Although many of the original MDGs\u2014such as cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality by two-thirds\u2014will not be met, the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years early.
\nThe MDGs may have helped marginally, by creating a yardstick for measuring progress, and by focusing minds on the evil of poverty. Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow\u2014and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.
\nPoverty rates started to collapse towards the end of the 20th century largely because developing-country growth accelerated, from an average annual rate of 4.3% in 1960-2000 to 6% in 2000-10. Around two-thirds of poverty reduction within a country comes from growth. Greater equality also helps, contributing the other third. A 1% increase in incomes in the most unequal countries produces a mere 0.6% reduction in poverty; in the most equal countries, it yields a 4.3% cut.
\nChina (which has never shown any interest in MDGs) is responsible for three-quarters of the achievement. Its economy has been growing so fast that, even though inequality is rising fast, extreme poverty is disappearing. China pulled 680m people out of misery in 1981-2010, and reduced its extreme-poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to 10% now.
\nThat is one reason why (as the\u00a0briefing<\/a>\u00a0explains) it will be harder to take a billion more people out of extreme poverty in the next 20 years than it was to take almost a billion out in the past 20. Poorer governance in India and Africa, the next two targets, means that China\u2019s experience is unlikely to be swiftly replicated there. Another reason is that the bare achievement of pulling people over the $1.25-a-day line has been relatively easy in the past few years because so many people were just below it. When growth makes them even slightly better off, it hauls them over the line. With fewer people just below the official misery limit, it will be more difficult to push large numbers over it.
\nSo caution is justified, but the goal can still be achieved. If developing countries maintain the impressive growth they have managed since 2000; if the poorest countries are not left behind by faster-growing middle-income ones; and if inequality does not widen so that the rich lap up all the cream of growth\u2014then developing countries would cut extreme poverty from 16% of their populations now to 3% by 2030. That would reduce the absolute numbers by 1 billion. If growth is a little faster and income more equal, extreme poverty could fall to just 1.5%\u2014as near to zero as is realistically possible. The number of the destitute would then be about 100m, most of them in intractable countries in Africa. Misery\u2019s billions would be consigned to the annals of history.<\/p>\n
\nThat is a lot of ifs. But making those things happen is not as difficult as cynics profess. The world now knows how to reduce poverty. A lot of targeted policies\u2014basic social safety nets and cash-transfer schemes, such as Brazil\u2019s Bolsa Fam\u00edlia\u2014help. So does binning policies like fuel subsidies to Indonesia\u2019s middle class and China\u2019s\u00a0hukou\u00a0<\/em>household-registration system (see\u00a0article<\/a>) that boost inequality. But the biggest poverty-reduction measure of all is liberalising markets to let poor people get richer. That means freeing trade between countries (Africa is still cruelly punished by tariffs) and within them (China\u2019s real great leap forward occurred because it allowed private business to grow). Both India and Africa are crowded with monopolies and restrictive practices.
\nMany Westerners have reacted to recession by seeking to constrain markets and roll globalisation back in their own countries, and they want to export these ideas to the developing world, too. It does not need such advice. It is doing quite nicely, largely thanks to the same economic principles that helped the developed world grow rich and could pull the poorest of the poor out of destitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"