Global Poverty: Rethinking Causality

Much ink has been spilled on poverty measurements and trends, at the expense of revealing causality. Assembling multi-disciplinary and international contributions, this book shows that a causal understanding of poverty in rich and poor countries is essential. That understanding must be based on a critical interrogation of the wider social relations which set up the mechanisms producing poverty as an outcome. Processes that widen/strengthen crisis-ridden market relations, that increase income/wealth inequality, and that ‘enhance’ the policy-biases of nation-states and international institutions toward the affluent-propertied strata cause global poverty and undermine poor people’s political power. The processes concentrating wealth-creation are poverty-causing processes. Through theoretical and empirical analyses this volume offers important insights and political prescriptions to address global poverty.

Contributors are:Raju J. Das, Deepak K. Mishra, Steven Pressman, Michael Roberts, Jamie Gough, Aram Eisenschitz, Anjan Chakravarty, Mizhar Mikati, Marcelo Milan, Tarique Niazi, John Marangos, Eirini Triarchi, Themis Anthrakidis, Macayla Kisten and Brij Maharaj, David Michael M. San Juan, and Thaddeus Hwong.

Raju J. Das, Ph.D. (1996), The Ohio State University, is a Professor at York University, Toronto. He has published articles in academic journals on political economy and international development. His recent books include Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World.

Deepak K. Mishra is Professor at Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His work focuses on the political economy of agrarian change, rural development, and labour migration in India.