POGGE, Thomas W.. Eradicating systemic poverty: brief for a Global Resources Dividend. Sur [online]. 2007, vol.3Selected edition, pp. 0-0. ISSN 1806-6445.
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"A Global Resources Dividend" in David A. Crocker & Toby Linden (Eds), Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 1998. [ Links ] 2. R. Reichel, "Internationaler Handel, Tauschgerechtigkeit und die globale Rohstoffdividende", Analyse und Kritik, Vol. 19, Issue 3, 1997, pp. 229-241; [ Links ] T. Kesselring, 'Weltarmut und Ressourcen-Zugang', Analyse und Kritik, Vol. 19, Issue 3, 1997, pp. 242-254; [ Links ] R. Crisp & D. Jamieson, "Egalitarianism and a Global Resources Tax: Pogge on Rawls" in Victoria Davion & Clark Wolf (Eds), The Idea of a Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2000. [ Links ] 3. R. Kreide, "Armut, Gerechtigkeit und Demokratie", Analyse und Kritik, Vol. 20, Issue 3, 1998, pp. 245-262; [ Links ] J. Mandle, 'Globalization and Justice', Annals of the American Academy, Vol. 570, 2000, pp. 126-139. [ Links ] 4. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2005, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 24, 44, 49. [ Links ] 5. See United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1999, available online at <http://www.fic.nih.gov/about/plan/exec_summary.htm>, accessed on January 9, 2007. [ Links ] 6. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1998, New York, Oxford University Press,1998. [ Links ] 7. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), The State of Food Insecurity in the World 1999, 1999. Available at < www.fao.org/news/1999/img/sofi99-e.pdf>, accessed on January 8, 2007. [ Links ] 8. International Labour Organisation (ILO), A Future Without Child Labour, 2002. Available online at <www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/decl/publ/reports/report3.htm>, accessed on January 8, 2007. [ Links ] 10. World Health Organization, The World Health Report 2004, WHO Publications, Geneva, 2001. Available online at <www.who.int/whr/2001>, accessed on January 8, 2007. [ Links ] 11. T. Nagel, "Poverty and Food: Why Charity Is Not Enough" in Peter Brown & Henry Shue (Eds), Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in Life and Death Choices, New York, Free Press,1977. [ Links ] 12. Suggested in O. O'Neill, "Lifeboat Earth" (1974) reprinted in Charles Beitz, Marshall Cohen, Thomas Scanlon & A. John Simmons (Eds), International Ethics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985; [ Links ] T. Nagel, "Poverty and Food: Why Charity Is Not Enough" in Peter Brown & Henry Shue (Eds), Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in Life and Death Choices, New York, Free Press,1977 [ Links ] and T. Pogge, Realizing Rawls, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1989, §24. [ Links ] 13. J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, MA, 1999, p. 108. [ Links ] 15. L. Wantchekon, "Why do Resource Dependent Countries Have Authoritarian Governments?", Working Paper, Yale University, 1999. Available online at <www.yale.edu/leitner/pdf/1999-11.pdf>, accessed on January 8, 2007 [ Links ] and T. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002, ch. 6. [ Links ] 16. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1999, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 3. [ Links ] To compare standards of living, PPPs are indeed appropriate. But general-consumption PPPs, based as they are on the prices of all commodities weighted by their share in international consumption, substantially overstate the purchasing power of the poor relative to the basic necessities on which they are compelled to concentrate their expenditures. This is so because poor countries tend to afford the greatest price advantages for commodities (services and other "non-tradables") which their poor citizens cannot afford to consume. By using PPPs that average out price differentials across all commodities, economists inflate the nominal incomes of the poor as if their consumption mirrored that of the world at large. For a detailed critique, see S. Reddy & T.W. Pogge, 'How Not to Count the Poor', 2002. Unpublished working paper, available online at <www.socialanalysis.org>, accessed on January 8, 2007.Even if one takes PPPs at face value, the increase in global inequality is alarming: Over a recent five-year period, "world inequality has increased [...] from a Gini of 62.8 in 1988 to 66.0 in 1993. This represents an increase of 0.6 Gini points per year. This is a very fast increase, faster than the increase experienced by the US and UK in the decade of the 1980's. [...] The bottom 5 percent of the world grew poorer, as their real incomes decreased between 1988 and 1993 by ¼, while the richest quintile grew richer. It gained 12 percent in real terms, that is it grew more than twice as much as mean world income (5.7 percent)": B. Milanovic, "True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Surveys Alone ", The Economic Journal, Vol. 112, 2002, p. 88. [ Links ] 18. See World Bank, <iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/jsp/index.jsp>, accessed on January 9, 2007. [ Links ] 19. T. Pogge, "Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the Global Poor", Leiden Journal of International Law, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2005, pp. 717-745. [ Links ] 20. Quoted in S. J. Gould, "The Moral State of Tahiti — and of Darwin", Natural History, Vol. 10, 1991, p.19. [ Links ] 21. Cf. also R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York Basic Books, 1974, ch. 4. [ Links ] 22. J. Locke (1689), "An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government" in Peter Laslett (Ed), John Locke: Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, §27 and §33. [ Links ] 25. The World Bank estimates that, in 2001, 1089 out of 6150 million human beings lived below the international poverty line, which it currently defines in terms of $32.74 PPP 1993 per month or $1.075 PPP 1993 per day (Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, "How Have the World's Poorest Fared Since the Early 1980s?", World Bank Research Observer, 2004, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 147-153.). [ Links ] 26. Cf. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books, New York, 1974, p. 231. [ Links ] 27. In the 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security, 186 governments made the solemn promise "to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015". More than half the period has passed with little or no reduction in the numbers of poor and undernourished people. But there is progress of a sort: The goal has been diminished. The UN Millennium Declaration promises "to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger," using 1990 as the baseline. With world population estimated to increase by 36% in the 1990-2015 period, the sought reduction in the number of poor and undernourished people between 1996 and 2015 is now not 50% but merely 19% (T. Pogge, "The First UN Millennium Development Goal: a Cause for Celebration?", Journal of Human Development, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2004, pp. 377-397; Spanish translation by David Álvarez García "El Primer Objetivo de Desarrollo de la ONU para el Milenio: ¿Un Motivo de Celebración?"). In the face of 18 million poverty-related deaths per year, the official go-slow approach is morally unacceptable and the lack of efforts toward implementing this approach appalling. It should also be said that the World Bank's severely flawed poverty measurement method leads to a gross understatement of the number of people living below its $1/day poverty line (S. Reddy & T.W. Pogge, 'How Not to Count the Poor', 2002. Unpublished working paper, available online at <www.socialanalysis.org>, accessed on January 8, 2007). Moreover, this poverty line is, of course, grotesquely low. (Just imagine a family of four living on $2200 per year in the US or on £1100 in the UK.) The World Bank provides statistics also for a more adequate poverty line that is twice as high: $786 PPP 1993 ($1100 PPP in 2006 or roughly $275 in the typical poor country) per person per year. 2735 million people — nearly half of humankind — are said to live below this higher poverty line, falling 42 percent below it on average (Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, "How Have the World's Poorest Fared Since the Early 1980s?", World Bank Research Observer, 2004, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp., 153, [ Links ] 28. Of this amount, under 10 percent is typically spent on poverty eradication or "basic social services" United Nations Statistics Divison, Millennium Development Goals Indicators, (available online at <mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/SeriesDetail.aspx?srid=592&crid=>, accessed on January 9, 2007) [ Links ] 29. Cf. World Bank 2006, World Development Report 2007, p. 289. [ Links ] 30. The end of the Cold War enabled the high-income countries to cut their aggregate military expenditure from 4.1 percent of their gross domestic product in 1985 to 2.2 percent in 1998 (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1998, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998, p. 197; [ Links ] Ibid., Human Development Report 2000, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, p. 217). [ Links ] The peace dividend these countries reap can then be estimated at $675 billion (1.9 percent of their current aggregate annual GDP of $35529 billion in the year 2005 — World Bank 2006, World Development Report 2007, p. 289. [ Links ] 31. S. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986. [ Links ] |
