Including the Poor: Proceedings of a Symposium (World Bank Regional and Sectoral Studies)

The incidence of poverty has fallen in most regions of the world since 1945. Yet despite decolonization and an expanding world economy, huge numbers of people remain poor, even in some countries that have enjoyed unprecedented economic growth, such as Brazil, India, and Pakistan. In 1985 about 600 million people in the developing world, including at least one in four Africans and Asians, were too poor to afford enough food on a reliable basis. This book surveys the relevance to the twin-track strategy of recent poverty research, much of it undertaken under the aegis of the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute. The authors provide general support for the strategy, but go beyond it. First, they develop further some concerns raised in World Development Report 1990 about measurement. Correct measures, used in allocating resources among groups of the poor, can save lives. Second, the authors stress the effect on poverty not only of policies, but of major events. These include normal concomitants of development, such as population change and imported technical advances in agriculture. Such events are not influenced mainly by domestic projects, or even by the policy conditions that a developing country government might negotiate with a donor. Yet antipoverty policy must allow for big events that alter its parameters, even if the events are largely exogenous. Third, the authors consider some overt remedies for poverty, including directly redistributive ones, such as land reform and social welfare payments. Such measures may seem old-fashioned - hostile to incentives, rent-creating, or politically inviable. Yet they seem likely to force their way back onto thepolitical and economic agenda, for example, as populations age in South Asia or as land hunger presses in East Africa. Many developing countries cannot push through, or pay for, much of the twin-track strategy without some redistribution of income, assets, or power. Finally, the book closes with studies of antipoverty actions and outcomes in three big developing India, Brazil, and Pakistan.