Towards Genuine Universalism within Contemporary Development Policy
Summary (2 min read)
1 Introduction
- The authors do not really know what has been happening to global poverty all things considered, particularly when measured against rising costs for education and healthcare, which are mostly not factored into poverty measures, for technical reasons.
- The mechanisms by which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) might have effected poverty reduction are not at all clear.
- The recent literature on the impact of aid on growth offers little useful insight given that it largely ignores the major global structural processes that condition the impact of aid flows, such as those reflected by global balance of payments asymmetries.
- Moreover, the emphasis in the MDGs on absolute measures and the implicit bias towards targeting quite possibly undermine poverty reduction in many contexts, particularly if poverty is primarily considered as an outcome of dynamic processes of social stratification and subordination.
- Serious consideration of the erosion of decent employment and wages and the increasing segmentation of social security systems throughout the developing world is particularly needed if the authors are to truly embrace a pro-poor agenda, i.e. not one that merely reduces absolute poverty regardless of inequality, but one that actually promotes equitable sharing without double standards.
2 Measuring poverty reduction
- At the outset, the impact of the MDGs on poverty reduction, here defined as income poverty as per Goal 1 of the MDGs, is very difficult to assess because poverty reduction itself is very difficult to measure.
- This received much attention through the debate between Reddy and Pogge (2002a,b) and Ravallion (2002), which was furthered by Wade (2004) among others.
- Poverty was decreasing in China from 1998 to 2000 according to the unreasonably-low official poverty line (i.e. the one often cited in World Bank publications in the early 2000s), but it was rising according to the more reasonable absolute poverty line calculated by the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (Hussain 2001, cited in Fischer 2005: 96–9).
- The exclusion is for technical reasons, given that they constitute large and highly irregular expenditure items across households and across time.
- By ignoring such dramatically changing price structures (as do Chen and Ravallion 2008), the authors simply do not know to what degree the appearance of improving poverty rates merely represents increasing relative prices for these essential services not included in the poverty line.
3 Global structural processes and aid
- The other side of the question on the poverty impact of the MDG paradigm is that the mechanisms by which MDGs might have effected poverty reduction are simply not clear.
- In any case, its replication or sustainability is questionable if only because the world economy has probably reached its limits of disequilibria.
- The role of aid must be considered in this light because aid will have very different macroeconomic implications depending on whether a receiving country is in current account deficit or surplus.
- Similarly, it is meaningless to argue that large increases in aid would produce better development (e.g. Sachs 2005) without examining the international mechanisms set in place to deliver aid, which for much of the last three decades have encouraged a haemorrhaging of human, physical and financial resources from poor to rich countries.
- Similar dynamics unfolded with the East Asian financial crisis in 1997–8 and the consolidation of the so-called Post-Washington Consensus.
4 Towards re-politicisation and genuine universalism
- In terms of what should replace the MDGs after 2015, it is important to recall three main criticisms of the MDGs: that they do not pay attention to employment, or inequality, and that they de-politicise development debates.
- Similar tendencies exist in the more recent iterations of the poverty agenda.
- The World Development Report on services (World Bank 2003) makes no explicit reference to universalism.
- Instead, it offers strong implicit endorsement of targeted New Public Management approaches to social policy, promoting choice and client power through various mixtures of decentralisation, private-provisioning, marketisation, user fees and vouchers.
5 Conclusion
- The embedding of the MDG agenda into a Washington Consensus paradigm is not simply a matter of one-size-fits-all versus context specificity.
- Rather, there are some broad general lessons that the authors can draw from the past.
- These are political challenges given that they cannot be resolved through technocratic solutions, but require choices to be made about the types of societies the authors wish to inhabit and how they wish to treat each other within and across these societies.
- Such repoliticisation needs to be backed up by a genuine revival, in research and in practice, of universalistic social policies as viable options for dealing simultaneously with poverty and inequality, if only because real political deliberation is very difficult to cultivate within a context of starkly unequal and segregated societies.
- For elaboration on these three and many other critiques, see Saith (2006).
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Frequently Asked Questions (12)
Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "Towards genuine universalism within contemporary development policy" ?
These are political challenges given that they can not be resolved through technocratic solutions, but require choices to be made about the types of societies the authors wish to inhabit and how they wish to treat each other within and across these societies.
Q3. What is the Achilles heel of the income poverty approach?
the fundamental Achilles heel of the income poverty approach is that education and health costs are mostly not included in the calculation of poverty lines.
Q4. What is the main reason why the MDGs are not a part of the Washington Cons?
More specifically, the emphasis in the MDGs on absolute measures and the implicit bias towards targeting predisposes the MDG agenda to be coopted by an orthodox approach to development policy.
Q5. What is the propensity of supply-side approaches to co-opt?
The recent turn towards conditional cash transfers, wellbeing approaches, and even rights-based approaches also carry this propensity to be co-opted by supply-side approaches.
Q6. How do they show that the average household in Asia has increased in poverty?
Merely by deducting catastrophic out-of-pocket payments for healthcare from the expenditures of households surveyed in 11 low- and middleincome countries in Asia (most surveys taken around 2000), they show that poverty rates across Asia increased from 19.3 per cent to 22 per cent, or an increase of 78 million people.
Q7. What is the guiding dictum for the next incarnation of the MDGs?
perhaps the guiding dictum for the next incarnation of the MDGs should not be ‘Make Poverty History (Part Two)’ but rather, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.
Q8. Why are the MDGs rooted in the fact that they are often framed in se?
They are rooted in the fact that policy choices are very political, even though these choices are often couched in seductively technocratic terms.
Q9. How did they estimate poverty rates in the 1990s?
By varying the poverty line parameters within reasonable boundaries, they estimated poverty rates as lying anywhere from 12.7 per cent to 65.8 per cent of the total population.
Q10. What is the main argument for the recent literature on the impact of aid on growth?
The recent literature on the impact of aid on growth offers little useful insight given that it largely ignores the major global structural processes that condition the impact of aid flows, such as those reflected by global balance of payments asymmetries.
Q11. What is the main argument of Dunleavy et al. (2006)?
as argued by Dunleavy et al. (2006), even in rich countries with well-developed administrative capacities, the policy complexity introduced by such approaches generally led to a reduction in citizen competence and the tide has since turned in ‘leading-edge’ countries.
Q12. What is the role of aid in the balance of payments of South Korea?
In an earlier developmental epoch, aid was understood as enabling poor countries to cover such trade deficits, as best represented by the crucial role of aid in the balance of payments of South Korea well into the 1970s.