About one fourth of the world's population--1.3 billion people--live in absolute poverty, while almost another third are very poor by every measure. A diverse group of participants from around the globe met at a recent Aspen Institute conference to discuss how to reduce poverty and its consequences. This book summarizes their discussions and conclusions on the role of globalization and the trend to market economies in overcoming poverty (not sufficient alone), the effectiveness of current poverty reduction programs and practices (can be improved, must be coordinated), and strategies and specific actions that can be taken alone or in partnerships by developing states, the private sector, civil society, and industrialized nations and organizations to overcome barriers to poverty reduction and bridge gaps between rich and poor. Proposing a strategy called "Market Plus;" the primary recommendations concern how the industrialized world can raise poverty on its action agenda. The book includes a speech to the conference by former President Jimmy Carter and commissioned papers by several well-known participants.

This is a revised edition of a seminal work on the nature of underdevelopment. It includes a new foreword and appendixes on the significance of plantations to Third World economies and the contribution that George Beckford made to Caribbean economic thought.

Poor people in developing countries are often affected by droughts, floods, illness, crop failure, job loss, and economic downturns. Much of their energy goes into coping with these shocks and into day-to-day survival. While insurance and credit markets, combined with widespread social security, provide an important cushion against poverty in rich countries, the need for immediate survival may lock the poor into persistent poverty in developing countries.The poor in developing countries do have informal mechanisms to cope with risk and misfortune. These are based on income diversification, risk avoidance, self-insurance by saving together with family, and community-based mutual assistance. Nevertheless, the scope of these mechanisms remains limited. Repeated individual-specific shocks such as illness or pests, or covariate risks associated with drought, flood, or recession, undermine the ability of individuals and their families to cope withrisk.We now know much more about vulnerability to risk and how poor people cope. Even more importantly, we have learned much about the large long-term consequences of these risks, which condemns many to persistent poverty and excludes them from economic growth. But there is much that can be done. The micro-level studies that underpin this book offer new insights on how effective public action could be more effective in protecting the vulnerable against persistent poverty. Policy should focus onproviding a comprehensive menu of ex-ante and post-crisis protection mechanisms, including new forms of insurance, savings, safety nets, and the means to strengthen the poor's asset base. Local communities have a big role to play: public funds should not be used to replace indigenous community-basedsupport networks; rather they should be used to build on the strengths of these networks to ensure broader and more effective protection.With numerous thematic chapters and case studies of both best practice and of failure, from a mix of low-income and middle-income countries across the developing world, this book evaluates alternatives in widening insurance and protection provision, and makes an important contribution to the topical field of insurance and risk.

Reviews causes of poverty in rural areas and presents a policy framework for reducing rural poverty, including through land reform, public works programs, access to credit, physical and social infrastructure, subsidies, and transfer of technology. Identifies key elements for drafting a policy to reduce rural poverty.

One out of every five Latin Americans or around 130 million people have never known anything but poverty, subsisting on less than US$4-a-day throughout their lives. These are the region ́s chronically poor, who have remained so despite unprecedented inroads against poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean since the turn of the century. Left Behind: Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean takes a closer look at the region’s entrenched poor, who and where they are, and how existing policies need to change in order to effectively assist them. The book shows significant variations of rates of chronic poverty both across and within countries. Within a single country, some regions show incidence rates up to eight times higher than the lowest. Despite the higher rates of chronic poverty in rural areas, chronic poverty is as much an urban as a rural issue. In fact, considering absolute numbers, urban areas in many countries, including Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, have more chronic poor than rural areas. Undoubtedly the region has come a long way during the decade in terms of poverty reduction, guided by a mix of sustained growth and increased levels in amounts and quality of public spending and programs targeted directly or indirectly to the chronic poor. While improving endowments and the context where the chronic poor live is a necessary condition going forward, the decade’s experience suggests that it may not be enough to reach the chronic poor. The book posits that refinements to the existing policy toolkit †“ as opposed to more programs †“ may come a long way in helping the remaining poor. These refinements include intensifying efforts to improve coordination between different social and economic programs, which can boost the income generation process and deal with the intergenerational transmission of chronic poverty by investing in early childhood development. Equally important though, there is an urgent need to adapt programs to directly address the psychological toll of chronic poverty on people’s mindset and aspirations, which currently undermines the effectiveness of the existing policy efforts.

Focuses on rural poverty and those countries in Asia with the largest number of chronically poor, including the two emerging superpowers of China and India, other countries of South Asia and the Mekong region as well as Indonesia and Philippines in Southeast Asia.

Based on a decade of research by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, this volume includes material on inter-generational transmission, the importance of assets and vulnerability, and conflict, and new thinking about the close relationship between social exclusion and adverse incorporation.

Globalization is characterised by persistent poverty and growing inequality. Conventional wisdom has it that this global poverty is residual – as globalization deepens, the poor will be lifted out of destitution. The policies of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO echo this belief and push developing countries ever deeper into the global economy. Globalization, Poverty and Inequality provides an alternative viewpoint. It argues that for many – particularly for those living in Latin America, Asia and Central Europe – poverty and globalization are relational. It is the very workings of the global system which condemn many to poverty. In particular the mobility of investment, and the large pool of increasingly skilled workers in China and other parts of Asia, are driving down global wages. This poses challenges for policy makers in firms and countries throughout the world. It also challenges the very sustainability of globalisation itself. Are we about to witness the implosion of globalisation, as occurred between 1913 and 1950? Using a variety of theoretical frameworks and drawing on a vast amount of original research, this book will be an invaluable resource for all students of globalization and its effects.

In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guide its operations worldwide. First is the eradication of chronic extreme poverty bringing the number of extremely poor people, defined as those living on less than 1.25 purchasing power parity (PPP)†“adjusted dollars a day, to less than 3 percent of the world’s population by 2030.The second is the boosting of shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of per capita real income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country. In 2015, United Nations member nations agreed in New York to a set of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first and foremost of which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms. Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growing acceptance of the idea that poverty is a multidimensional concept that reflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said, there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivations should be measured, and on whether or how information on them should be aggregated. Monitoring Global Poverty: Report of the Commission on Global Poverty advises the World Bank on the measurement and monitoring of global poverty in two areas: What should be the interpretation of the definition of extreme poverty, set in 2015 in PPP-adjusted dollars a day per person? What choices should the Bank make regarding complementary monetary and nonmonetary poverty measures to be tracked and made available to policy makers? The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate on combating poverty, and the indicators and data that the Bank collates and makes available shape opinion and actual policies in client countries, and, to a certain extent, in all countries. How we answer the above questions can therefore have a major influence on the global economy.

Prior work has shown that there is a significant amount of turnover amongst the African poor as households exit and enter poverty. Some of this mobility can be attributed to regular movement back and forth in response to exogenous variability in climate, prices, health, etc. ('churning'). Other crossings of the poverty line reflect permanent shifts in long-term well-being associated with gains or losses of productive assets or permanent changes in asset productivity due, for example, to adoption of improved technologies or access to new, higher-value markets. Distinguishing true structural mobility from simple churning is important because it clarifies the factors that facilitate such important structural change. Conversely, it also helps identify the constraints that may leave other households caught in a trap of persistent, structural poverty. The papers in this book help to distinguish the types of poverty and to deepen understanding of the structural features and constraints that create poverty traps. Such an understanding allows communities, local governments and donors to take proactive, effective steps to combat persistent poverty in Africa. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies.