Structural transformations should promote full and productive employment as well as decent work, while governments should have enough policy and fiscal space to enable them to play a proactive role and to provide adequate universal social protection.
The last three decades also saw the divorce of social policies from overall development strategies as a consequence of the drive for smaller government. National economic development strategies were replaced with donor-favored poverty-reduction programs, such as land-titling, micro-credit and “bottom of the pyramid” marketing to the poor.
Such fads have not succeeded in significantly reducing poverty. This is not to deny some positive consequences. For example, micro-credit has empowered millions of women, while important lessons have been learned from such schemes’ design and implementation.
Meanwhile, universal social programs have improved human welfare much more than targeted and conditional programs. However, conditional cash-transfer programs have been quite successful in improving various human-development indicators.
Unfortunately, poverty remains endemic, with more than 1 billion people going hungry every day. Urgent action is needed, as the recent financial and economic crisis, following hard on the heels of the food-price crisis, is believed to have set back progress on poverty reduction even further. There are also growing fears that climate change will more adversely threaten the lives of the poor.
The UN’s biennial Report on the World Social Situation, entitled Rethinking Poverty, makes a compelling case for rethinking poverty-measurement and poverty-reduction efforts. For the world’s poor, “business as usual” has never been an acceptable option. Nor have the popular trends of recent decades proven to be much better. There will be no real poverty eradication without equitable and sustainable economic development, which deregulated markets have proved unable to deliver on their own.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram is UN assistant secretary-general for economic development.
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