Ending Global Poverty: Why Money Isn't Enough
- (pp. 173-200)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
Between 1981 and 2013, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell by 34 percentage points. This paper argues that such rapid reductions will become increasingly hard to achieve for two reasons. First, the majority of the poor now live in middle-income countries where the benefits of growth have often been distributed selectively and unequally. Second, a reservoir of extreme poverty remains in low-income countries where growth is erratic and aid often fails to reach the poor. If the international community is to most effectively leverage available resources to end extreme poverty, it must ensure that its investments in institutions and physical infrastructure actually provide the poor the capabilities they need to craft an effective pathway out of poverty. We term the human and social systems that are required to form this pathway "invisible infrastructure" and argue that an effective domestic state is central to building this. By corollary, ending extreme poverty will require both expanding state capacity and giving the poor power to demand reforms they need by solving agency problems between citizens, politicians, and bureaucrats.Citation
Page, Lucy, and Rohini Pande. 2018. "Ending Global Poverty: Why Money Isn't Enough." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32 (4): 173-200. DOI: 10.1257/jep.32.4.173Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- F35 Foreign Aid
- H23 Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
- I32 Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
- I38 Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
- O15 Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
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