What is the relation, if any, between democracy, equality, and fundamental rights?
What conditions in a country are favorable (or unfavorable) for the development, consolidation,
and stability of democracy, equality, and rights?
How, if at all, can democracy, equality, and rights be promoted in a country where the favorable conditions are weak or lacking?
Most definitions of poverty by economists have defined it with respect to being able to attain a standard of living. So for example according to Ravallion (1994, p.3) “poverty can be said to exist in a given society when one or more persons do not attain a level of economic well-being deemed to constitute a reasonable minimum by the standards of that society”. The World Development Report in 1990 defined poverty as “the inability to attain a minimal standard of living”. The traditional method of obtaining data to identify the poor and investigate poverty issues is to conduct large household surveys that collect information ranging from household expenditures and incomes to the educational attainment and anthropometric measures of members of the household. Either consumption expenditures or income measures have formed the basis of the welfare measure that is developed to identify the poor. In many studies using household data the minimal standard of living is proxied by the level of consumption expenditure that will enable the household or individual to attain their basic needs. This usually means being able to purchase a basket of goods containing the minimum quantity of calories and non-food commodities. All households not able to achieve this critical level of consumption expenditure or income are described as poor.
What do we know? The Levine-Renelt assessment (19920: growth, investment and trade.) The role of trade policies. The fragility of the ‘convergence result’: time period
and non-OECD sample.
While the importance of legal institutions to business and investment has received considerable attention in the literature, there has been little systematic exploration of the role that the rule of law plays in ameliorating poverty.
Em todo este relatório, vimos que as políticas e instituições no âmbito nacional e local são as chaves para aumentar a oportunidade, autonomia e segurança dos pobres. Mas as vidas dos pobres também são afe-tadas por forças externas: comércio global, fluxos de capital, assistência oficial ao desenvolvimento, avanço tecnológico, doenças e conflitos, para citar apenas al-guns. Portanto, as ações no âmbito global são com-plementos cruciais da ação nacional. Podem acelerar
a redução da pobreza e ajudar a diminuir as diferenças (de renda, saúde e outras dimensões) entre países ricos e pobres. Este capítulo examina quatro áreas importantes de ação internacional para redução da pobreza: Ampliar o acesso dos mercados nos países ricos aos bens e serviços dos países em desenvolvimento. Reduzir o risco de crises econômicas. Incentivar a produção de bens públicos interna-cionais que beneficiem os pobres. Assegurar a participação dos países e grupos pobres nos foros globais.
The purpose of this paper is to explore under what conditions the current biotechnological revolution in agriculture could be helpful to reduce poverty in the developing countries.
Aid has been assessed (World Bank 1998, Burnside and Dollar 1997). The question raised thirteen years ago by Cassen and alii (Does Aid Work? 1986) has been answered. It can work, depending on policies. If they are good, aid will be efficient, if they are not, aid will be useless, at best. Aid has to be allocated to those countries pursuing good policies, to a larger extent, it is argued, than is already the case. Aid effectiveness and aid selectivity issues are thus simultaneously solved. Coming after thirty years of academic work and political discussions and facing a resilient agnosticism about the effects of external aid on development (see the survey of H. White, 1994), the new paradigm may appear as reassuring. However it raises two basic related problems: is good policy the only conditioning factor ? Is it the single right criterion according to which aid should be allocated ? If the answer to these questions is negative, aid needs to be reassessed, which is what we try to suggest. In this paper we argue that aid effectiveness (also) depends on exogenous (mostly external) environment factors (terms of trade trend and real value of exports instability, climatic shocks, etc...): the worse environment, the higher aid needs and the higher productivity of aid, we suppose.
Making a real dent in global poverty requires (1) improvements in economic institutions and policies in the developing world and (2) more efficient management of official development assistance (foreign aid). Some critics bemoan that the volume of aid has declined so precipitously, at a time when needs seem so great. The framework that the author is going to offer up suggests that if we concentrate on making aid efficient at poverty reduction, volume will take care of itself. And the key to effective aid – and more importantly to development itself – is sound institutions and policies. In this short note the author is going to highlight how we can use what we know to make aid more effective.
