Pro-industrial policies promote industry, pro-health policy promote health, pro-education policies promote education. So it is natural that India’s pro-poor policies — and let’s be very clear that every single one of India’s economic policies have been pro-poor — work and promote poverty and the number of poor keeps on going up. The absolute number keeps growing. What about the percentage? It does keep improving.
So what’s the latest on poverty in India from the World Bank? It is reported that the WB released some study which talks about the changes in …

A magazine article in the New York Times of April 13th has the rather mistaken and misleading title “Can the Cell Phone End Global Poverty?” (Hat tip: Abhishek Sarda). The article title is misleading because it doesn’t even remotely attempt to answer that question. It is instead about what is called a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist,” in this case someone who works for Nokia and essentially tries to figure out how people actually use their phones and thus how phone companies should design phones for greater usability.

There appears to be a thriving cottage industry which is primarily engaged in churning out shallow pieces of journalistic garbage. The pieces detail a particular person’s or family’s struggles and then juxtapose it in some dramatic way with perceived overall prosperity. The implicit argument is that there is an immense injustice being perpetrated against the poor, that it is all the fault of those who are not poor, and that the poor have absolutely no responsibility for the miserable state of affairs. These articles reveal a lot without intending to. …

The Oxfam America site asks In a World of Abundance, Why Hunger? (July 8, 2002)
Poverty and hunger are the world’s greatest challenges

1.2 billion people–one out of five–live on less than $1 a day.
More than 800 million people are hungry, including 31 million in the United States.
Every day, 24,000 people die from hunger and other preventable causes. One billion people do not have adequate shelter, and 2.4 billion people do not have access to proper sanitation. More than 1 billion people in developing …

In a land where reportedly every generalization is trivially true, one generalization holds non-trivially and with overwhelming force. It is this: Indian governments are pro-poor. Every policy that any government ever espouses, fundamentally it always is pro-poor, irrespective of any minor variations such as pro-market or pro-planning or pro-industrialization or pro-globalization or pro-self sufficiency or whathaveyou.
My claim is that this pro-poor policy is not mere rhetoric. The policy works and how. I argue that all other policies have not yielded their expected results but the pro-poor policies have delivered …

Economists conventionally list land, labor and capital as the three factors of production. If combined appropriately using the right technology, stuff is produced. This produced stuff is then the total income. Productive efficiency is important of course for a society to be economically secure. Then there is the matter of equity. You have to distribute the stuff produced equitably. Productive efficiency and distributive equity must be part of a healthy economy. But then if sufficient factors of production exist and the technology is also available, then how does one account …

I have never been able to shake off the conviction that there must be a very good economic reason for why there are so many poor people around the world. You may say that I am crazy to connect what apparently are totally distinct facts about the world but bear with me for a bit while I lay out my argument.
I argue that the large pool of poor people serve as a reservoir of extremely cheap labor which helps the rich. The rich have control and are powerful. …

According to UN estimates, India has the largest number of hungry people. Over 200 million, or about one-fifth of India’s population, is chronically hungry. This is an apparent paradox in a country which is food-surplus on the aggregate. The Wall Street Journal of June 25th 2004 reports that according to Indian government sources, by 2001 India had a national stockpile of around 60 million tons of rice and wheat. It goes on to say:
But with inefficiency and local mismanagement plaguing distribution, it couldn’t move the grain fast …

Economic analysis can be broadly categorized as either ‘positive’ or ‘normative.’ Positive analysis refers to the investigation of how things are, whereas normative analysis is concerned with how things should be. The former is supposed to be value-neutral whereas the latter is necessarily an expression of one’s values. A study by the UN determined that about a billion people around the world live in absolute squalor in the world’s cities and that every third person will be slum dweller within 30 years. That is a positive statement. The …

As a graduate student, I decided to spend my first term at UC Berkeley at the University Students’ Cooperative Association (USCA). The USCA is the largest student housing cooperative in North America modeled after the Rochdale Principles. The USCA is student run and student owned. In all we had about 20 houses and 4 apartment complexes housing about 2,000 students.
The house that I lived in is called Cloyne Court. It used to be a hotel and is even listed as a national historical monument. Cloyne Court housed about …

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) are benchmarks of progress in a global attempt at alleviating poverty. The eight goals and their associated targets clearly address a complex set of effects the fundamental cause of which is poverty.
For the record, here are the MDG:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
4. Reduce child mortality.
5. Improve maternal health.
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability.
8. Develop a global partnership for development.