Chapter Abstract
How can we end Poverty? This chapter considers why poverty remains so persistent in global politics, and it critically assesses the solutions that are meant to eradicate global poverty. Using modernization and microfinance in South Asia as an illustrative example, the chapter shows how neoliberal interventions aimed at modernizing these economies have undermined the social contract between the rich and the poor, leaving the latter more vulnerable to exploitation. At the same time, it shows how neoliberal microfinance schemes aimed at empowering the poor fail to address the structural problems that have left them impoverished. Crucially, it suggests that these neoliberal solutions fail to accord the poor any notion of dignity or personhood because they ignore their cultural embeddedness.
Additional reading
Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Esther Duflo (2011) Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. New York: PublicAffairs.
Winner of several awards, this book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty through numerous empirical examples, including hundreds of randomized control trials to establish why the poor live different lives despite similar abilities and desires enjoyed by those who are not poor.
Davies, Matt and Magnus Ryner (eds) (2006) Poverty and the Production of World Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
An exciting collection relocating poverty within structures of global political economy.
Davis, Mike (2006) Planet of Slums, London: Verso.
A breathtaking account of new forms of poverty produced by runaway urbanization.
Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen (1989) Hunger and Public Action, Oxford: Clarendon Press. One of the major statements by two leading economists on the need for rethinking public policy to eliminate hunger.
Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen (1991) The Political Economy of Hunger, vols I–III, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Perhaps the most important studies of hunger and the complexity of understanding it.
Edkins, Jenny (2000) Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
A highly original book on the limits of received conceptions of eradicating famine.
Escobar, Arturo (1994) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
One of the most important post-structuralist critiques of modernization and development.
George, Susan (1976) How the Other Half Dies, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
A classic statement on global inequality and its effects.
Goulet, Denis (1971) The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development, New York: Atheneum.
A key ethical critique of conventional theories of development.
Levine, David P. and S. Abu Turab Rizvi (2005) Poverty, Work, and Freedom: Political Economy and the Moral Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
One of the most compelling challenges to mainstream wisdom on poverty.
Mahbub ul Haq (1976) The Poverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World, New York: Columbia University Press.
One of the classics in the field of development economics and global inequality.
Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, London: Blond and Briggs.
One of the first books on environmentalism and sustainable development.
South Commission (1990) The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South Commission, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
An important report on Third World development from its perspective.
Yunus, Muhammad and Alan Jolis (2010) Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, US: ReadHowYouWant.com.
This autobiographical account of the founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, presents an incisive window into the genealogy of micro-finance and its socio-historical context.
UNDP (2003) Human Development Report 2003: Millennium Development Goals: A Compact Among Nations to End Human Poverty, http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2003/.
A very useful report on recent thinking on eliminating global poverty.