Category: Poverty

Later this week I’ll be giving a paper at a conference in Paris on The Politics of  Inclusion, organised by CROP (the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty)  and Unesco.  This is the abstract.

Poverty is at root a relational concept, which can only be understood by locating the experience of poor people in the social and economic situation where they are found. This is not just saying that poverty is ‘relative’. Developments in policy and practice are increasingly focused on dynamic, relational and multi-dimensional understandings of poverty; our conceptual frameworks have failed to keep pace.

Much of the consideration of poverty in the course of the last hundred years, relative or absolute, has found it convenient to rely on three fallacies. The first is that poverty is a condition or state of being, which can be considered exclusively from the perspective of the individual who experiences it. The second is that can be understood solely in terms of resources, when resources themselves have to be understood in terms of social and economic relationships. The third is that there is a clear and decisive threshold below which people can be said to be poor, and above which they are not poor.

All of these positions are tenable – they are supported by many of the most eminent writers in the field – but they are not adequate, either as a way of describing the positions that people hold, or as a conceptual tool to analyse the issues.  Discussions of exclusion, a concept which is self-evidently relational, come closer to the idea of poverty than much of the academic literature on poverty in itself, offering a way to escape from the limitations of conventional models of poverty.

I’ve just finished working my way through Martin Ravallion’s magnum opus, The economics of poverty (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Ravallion was the leading economist in this field for the World Bank, and is now a Professor of Economics at Georgetown.  For Ravallion, there have been two ‘poverty enlightenments’: the early nineteenth century, when economists started to address the problems, and the 1960s and 70s, when poverty was ‘rediscovered’ and many contemporary techniques were devised or refined.   There has been a third wave since then, as people have come to understand the multidimensional and relational character of poverty, the political and legal dimensions of the concept and the importance of voice and empowerment; but Ravallion doesn’t have much time for all that.   Multidimensional indicators are ‘mashups’, poverty is at best ‘weakly relative’ with an absolute core and the experience of poverty is individual.

There’s lots to disagree with, then.  Most of the book is a review of economic techniques for the analysis of anti-poverty programmes; occasionally it’s heavy going.  Ravallion is at his best in the section on impact evaluation, even if I disagree with much about the basic approach.  Ravallion is a true believer in the value of multivariate analysis; missing values can be filled in by the computer (p 158), and the influences on poverty can be identified by letting variables “‘fight it out’ statistically to determine how much each variable matters” (p 249).

There are a couple of sideways mentions of my book, The idea of poverty, and the joy of blogging is that I can reply.  Ravallion is critical of the contention that structural adjustment made things worse for poor people. I’ve written more about structural adjustment, but in the book in question I had written only this brief comment:

In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank promoted ‘structural adjustment’, a particular model of economic reform for developing countries – creating opportunities for international business, imposing strict financial discipline, increasing inequality and cutting the public sector.  Even when this worked, it generally increased the vulnerability of the poor.  When it did not, it could have very detrimental effects, because it weakened investment in human capital and cut away the main social protections that poorer people might have had.

Ravallion comments:

The critics of adjustment efforts argued that they were externally imposed and ill-conceived agendas for reform. In the 1980s it was often claimed that these programs increased poverty and inequality and one still hears such claims. [Note 174:   For example, Spicker (2007, 127) asserts that these programs generally increased inequality and poverty.]  The claims were rarely based on good evidence and, by and large, they did not stand up well to more careful empirical scrutiny.

Well, I did write that “Even when this worked, it generally increased the vulnerability of the poor.”  And another poverty expert wrote this:

This success against extreme poverty has come with continuing vulnerability to aggregate economic contraction, with one-in-six people in the developing world now living between $2 and $3 per day.

I wrote that the programmes increased inequality, and the same expert wrote, with a reservation I’d accept, that

Better (in the sense of “pro-market”) institutions … offer some hope for poor people, but it must be judged a rather limited hope based on experience.  The favored institutions tend in practice  to perform less well for poorer people. … [S]uppose that reforming developing countries fall into two categories: those for which pre-reform controls on the economy benefited the rich, keeping inequality artificially high (arguably the case in much of Latin America up to the 1980s), and those in which the controls had the opposite effect, keeping inequality low (as in Eastern Europe and Central Asia prior to the 1990s). Then economic policy reforms can entail sizable redistribution between the poor and the rich, but in opposite directions.

The expert in question is, of course, Martin Ravallion, on pages 448, 409-10 and 439 of this book.

CROP, the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty, has just published a poverty brief I wrote for them, on Poverty as a wicked problem.   In the brief I argue for a pragmatic approach to poverty, rather than an analytical one.  Poverty is a wicked issue – complex, multidimensional, unclear and changeable. There is not one problem to be addressed. If we are not dealing with a set, specific problem, or even a defined process, there is little point in chasing after definitive, mechanistic answers.   There are some common misunderstandings about anti-poverty policy. The first is the belief that we can prevent poverty by identifying and dealing with its causes, or the ‘generative mechanisms’ that lead to people being poor; this has led to a long series of bad policies. The second misconception is to suppose that if we know what causes the problems, we will know how to stop them; the way into a problem is not usually the way out of it. Neither position is tenable, and too often they have led policy astray.

The problems are not going to sit there waiting for someone to solve them, so that they can be picked off one by one; new problems and issues are arising all the time. Poverty is dynamic – constantly shifting and changing, as an enormous range of processes coincide and collide. One of the central insights offered by the emphasis on poverty as a multidimensional issue has been to emphasise the importance of the perceptions, experience and voice of people who suffer it, as a way of clarifying issues and developing priorities.

This is from a speech given yesterday by Michael Higgins, the President of the Irish Republic.  The full text is here.

There can be no doubt that how a society treats its more vulnerable citizens, how it deals with helping people into work and protecting those unable to work, is a critical reflection of its moral core. A society that creates a culture of suspicion or hostility towards those living below the poverty line; or that patronises and infantilises them; or that fails to view its citizens living in poverty as individual people with individual problems, preferring to dismiss them as homogenous members of an inadequate underclass, cannot easily lay claim to being part of a functioning democracy.  …

There are challenges too to our administrative systems.  When people living in poverty are treated as numerical units or administrative cases; when they are forced to jump multiple and difficult hurdles in order to claim financial benefits to which they are entitled; too many occasions when they are required to navigate their way around overly complicated procedures and layers of red tape in order to avail of vital services, we insult and demean those amongst us who are guilty of nothing except living, day in day out, below the poverty line.

When a citizen experiencing poverty is not enabled to exercise their voice, or to claim their rights and entitlements, not empowered to enter into informed dialogue about decisions which affect their lives, rendered unable to defend themselves or to assert their opinion or to speak up and object when they feel their rights are being violated or ignored, or obstructed from access to an education that would open up windows of opportunity, they have been failed by a society that claims to operate on the principles of a democratic republic.

It is hard to imagine any senior politician or dignitary in the UK delivering a similar address, and that is to be regretted.