POVERTY: Brazil launches drive to lift 16 mln from poverty

Writing by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Cynthia Osterman : Jun 1 2011
BRASILIA, June 2 (Reuters) - President Dilma Rousseff launched an ambitious plan on Thursday to eliminate dire poverty in Brazil within four years by lifting more than 16 million people from conditions of "misery."
The "Brazil Without Misery" program is the signature policy of the former leftist guerrilla's first term, her advisers said, fulfilling one of the key promises she made in her campaign for the presidency last year.
Poorer voters, millions of whom benefited from rapid economic growth and an expanded anti-poverty program under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are the main electoral base for Rousseff's center-left Workers' Party.
The announcement of the new program in the capital Brasilia was a welcome relief for Rousseff following weeks of negative media coverage over a scandal that has tainted her chief of staff and exposed differences with her main coalition ally, the PMDB party.
The success of the Bolsa Familia family stipend program under Lula, which helped lift about 20 million people into a thriving lower middle class, showed that cutting poverty was a crucial part of Brazil's economic success, Rousseff said at a ceremony in the capital.
"Brazil proved to the world that the best way to grow is distributing wealth," she said, flanked by her troubled chief of staff Antonio Palocci and Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB in an apparent show of unity.
Despite the strides Brazil has made in recent years, with brisk growth rates that have pushed it up the ranks of the world's largest economies, it still faced a "crisis" of poverty that was more serious than any financial crisis, she said.
"We can't forget that the most permanent, challenging and harrowing crisis is having chronic poverty in this country."

MULTI-PRONGED APPROACH
The new program aims to raise 16.2 million people above the level of extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than 70 reais ($44) per month, through a multi-pronged approach of expanded financial aid, improved education, access to water and energy, as well as job training.
The Bolsa Familia program, which gives a monthly stipend to families based on their children's school attendance, will be expanded to another 800,000 families, officials said. The program, which has been praised by the World Bank and copied by other developing countries, already reaches more than a quarter of Brazil's 190 million population.
Officials say poor families will also be provided with education and job training under the program, noting that 40 percent of those in extreme poverty are under the age of 14.
Families will be able to claim Bolsa Familia payments for 5 children, up from 3 now, resulting in another 1.3 million children included in the program.
The new anti-poverty drive will also quadruple the number of poor rural farmers who benefit from government food purchases and payments of up to 2,400 reais every six months to improve their productivity.
A separate Bolsa Verde (Green Stipend) program will hand out 300 reais every three months to families who help to preserve forests where they live.
"It is the state arriving where the poverty is, not the poor having to seek help," said Tereza Campello, the social development minister.
"It's a challenge implementing the policies."
Officials did not say how much the new program would cost.
The Bolsa Familia program has been widely praised for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. While critics say it creates dependency on state handouts, the program stands in stark contrast to previous attempts in Brazil to reduce hunger that were bogged down by food distribution problems and theft.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/brazil-poverty-idUSN0225114420110602

MALNUTRITION: India: Many eat poorly. Would a “right to food” help?

March 31st 2011

“LOOK at this muck,” says 35-year-old Pamlesh Yadav, holding up a tin-plate of bilious-yellow grains, a mixture of wheat, rice and mung beans. “It literally sticks in the throat. The children won’t eat it, so we take it home and feed it to the cows.”



Mrs Yadav has brought her children to a state-run nursery in Bhindusi village in rural Rajasthan. The free midday meal is being dished out. Neither she nor anyone else in Bhindusi looks plump enough to turn down such an offer. Stray dogs scamper through the nursery and toddlers are being weighed in the corner while food is passed around. Most are underweight. Mrs Yadav herself is anaemic, like almost all local women; she survives on potato curry and wheat chapatis. Even so, she rejects a free lunch. “The only reason the women come here is because of the creche,” admits Shafia Khan, who is in charge of state nurseries in the district. “The children don’t like the food. And the ones you see here are the lucky ones. Out in the fields, it is terrible. Everyone is listless; they all suffer from vitamin and iron deficiencies.”



The nursery is part of India’s Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS), the largest child-nutrition programme in the world. Its woes in Rajasthan are part of a larger problem. India is an outlier. Its rate of malnutrition—nearly half the children under three weigh less than they should—is much higher than it should be given India’s level of income. And the burden has shifted more slowly than it ought to have done given Indian growth. Lawrence Haddad, the director of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, reckons that every 3-4% increase in a developing country’s income per head should translate into a 1% fall in rates of underweight children. In India the rate has barely shifted in two decades of growth. Per person, India eats less, and worse, than it used to. Mr Haddad calls the country the world’s Jekyll and Hyde: economic powerhouse, nutritional weakling. Over a third of the world’s malnourished children live there.
When India was poor, its failure to feed itself properly did not seem odd. Poverty was explanation enough. But after one of the most impressive growth spurts in history, the country’s inability to lift the curse of malnutrition has emerged as its greatest failure—and biggest puzzle. Nothing fully accounts for it. True, farming has not shared in the same dazzling success as the rest of the economy, lately rising by only a point or two per person per year. But some African countries have seen farm output per head actually fall—and they have still cut malnutrition more than India.
It is also true that India’s food bureaucracy is a byword for inefficiency and corruption. People steal from the cheap-food shops of the Public Distribution System (PDS) on an industrial scale. Newspapers call a case of theft now under investigation in Uttar Pradesh “the mother of all scams”. At one point, the country’s top investigative agency said it had given up even trying to cope with the 50,000 separate charges. But again, other countries have corrupt bureaucracies, too—or none, which may be as bad.
So the most convincing explanations for India’s nutritional failures probably lie elsewhere. Women are the most important influences upon their children’s health—and the status of women in India is notoriously low. Brides are deemed to join their husband’s family on marriage and are often treated as unpaid skivvies. “The mothers aren’t allowed to look after themselves,” says Mrs Khan. “Their job is simply to have healthy babies.” But if mothers are unhealthy, their children frequently are, too.
India is also riven by caste and tribal divisions. It is no coincidence that states with the most dalits (former untouchables) or tribes (such as Bihar and Orissa) have higher malnutrition rates than those, like Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, with fewer of these excluded groups. So-called scheduled castes and tribes are more likely than other Indians to suffer the ills of poor diet.
But that cannot be the whole story. Astonishingly, a third of the wealthiest 20% of Indian children are malnourished, too, and they are neither poor nor excluded. Bad practice plays some part—notably a reluctance to breastfeed babies. There may also be an element of choice. Long ago, a study in Maharashtra showed that people spend only two-thirds of their extra income on food—and this is true whether they are middle-income or dirt-poor. That may seem perverse. But a mobile phone may be more useful to the poor than better food, since the phone may generate income during the next harvest failure, and good food will not.

Wanted: Bolsa India
These explanations matter because they raise questions about the Indian government’s current attempt to offer a universal “right to food”. Over the past 20 years, the supreme court has said that Indians have various social rights (to work, education and so on) and can sue the government if they are not honoured. The free school-meal programme was an attempt to implement a right to food. Now the government wants to go further. It is talking about giving cheap food to about 90% of country-dwellers and 50% of city folk—three-quarters of all Indians.
Leave aside the budgetary implications, which are awe-inspiring. Such a programme would hugely expand the terminally dysfunctional PDS. It would do little or nothing for neglected castes and tribes. It would not raise the status of women, or encourage breastfeeding and early nutrition. (As Mrs Khan says, “the crucial time is between the ages of nought and three, but we’re not really reaching them.”) Giving cash, rather than food itself, would be better. Better still, India should look to international experience and introduce a conditional cash-transfer scheme, such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família, which pays the mother if her children attend school. India hankers after “universal” benefits that would leave millions malnourished. It should instead learn from schemes that target those who need help—and which actually work.
http://www.economist.com/node/18485871?story_id=18485871&fsrc=rss

POVERTY: Helping the World’s Poorest, for a Change

TINA ROSENBERG
Tuesday’s Fixes column was about conditional cash transfers, a new and highly successful large-scale anti-poverty program. It pays poor women as long as they meet certain responsibilities, like keeping their children in school and taking their families for regular medical care. It’s in use in Brazil, Mexico and 38 other countries.
Many commenters were skeptical that programs to help the poor could actually work in corrupt or badly governed nations. It’s certainly rare to find successful social programs in places where laws and institutions are very weak. But conditional cash transfers have features that allow them to work even in badly governed countries. It’s useful to look at what these features are.
In 1994, a third of all Mexicans were living in extreme poverty, which meant their incomes did not cover even food alone.
These programs start with an idea that shouldn’t be unusual but, sadly, is — giving help to people who need it most. Social programs in many poor countries tend to benefit people who aren’t those in the greatest need. In health and education for instance, money is spent disproportionately on urban hospitals and universities, as these programs have powerful political constituencies. In most of the countries where they exist, conditional cash transfers are the first programs to truly focus on the poorest.
Before Brazil began Bolsa Familia, its only large social program was old-age pensions. These pensions only went to formal-sector workers; but the really poor of Brazil don’t have formal-sector jobs. Before Mexico had Oportunidades, its “help” for the poor took the form of a corrupt and wasteful network of shops selling subsidized milk, tortillas and bread. These programs were designed to please large dairy, corn and wheat farmers (something that should be familiar to anyone who takes a look at the U.S. farm bill.) Subsidies on bread? Poor Mexicans don’t even eat bread — they eat tortillas.
Mexico was able to change this because of the Tequila Crisis — the 1994 crash of the peso, when the economy contracted by six percent. A third of all Mexicans were living in extreme poverty, which meant their incomes did not cover even food alone. The government of Ernesto Zedillo knew that the food subsidy programs would do little to help. So it decided to find something better. Santiago Levy, then an undersecretary in the finance ministry, reasoned that subsidies were just an inefficient way to give the poor money — so why not give them money? At the time, this was considered a crazy idea. No other country did it.
Levy reasoned that the program would be much more effective if the money could be used as leverage. He set up a pilot project in a faraway state in secret — so as not to attract the attention of special interest groups. It worked. The pilot showed that it was logistically feasible to carry out the program; that families preferred cash over subsidies; that families did go to the doctor, and that, despite what skeptical Mexican cabinet members had warned, men did not beat up their wives, take the money and get drunk. Giving out cash proved to be hugely more efficient than the old food subsidies. Mexico found it could help many times more people with the same money it was spending on the old programs. One reason is that Opportunidades is careful to enroll only the people who need it most.
People will be corrupt when they have the chance. But Oportunidades aims to minimize the possibilities for patronage and corruption.
The program uses census data to find the poorest rural areas and urban blocks, and within those areas, gives out questionnaires about people’s income and possessions. What do you make? Do you have a dirt or cement floor? Do you own a hot-water heater? The homes of those who qualify are visited to verify their answers. Families must be recertified every three years, and according to Salvador Escobedo, the current director, about 10 percent leave each year — either because they have failed to complete their responsibilities, or they graduate and are no longer extremely poor. Mexico checks on whether families are keeping up with their responsibilities by having schools and clinics keep computerized track of attendance.
What about corruption in a country like Mexico? People will be corrupt when they have the chance. Amy from Los Angeles reports that in the Mexico City slum where she lived, people had to march with and vote for the locally-governing political party in order to get Oportunidades money. But the program aims to minimize the possibilities for patronage and corruption.
When I went back to Mexico, where I used to live, to report on Oportunidades in 2008, I was at first puzzled by the ubiquity of signs announcing “Oportunidades is a program of the federal government.” But there was a good reason for these signs — they were telling people that they shouldn’t give in to pressure from local leaders in order to get their payments. All program criteria are national – no decisions get made on the local level. If Amy is right, some local governments trick their people into thinking that they have influence. But it’s not many.
Oportunidades has no shops. No goods move, only money — and much of that electronically. The money is handled by banks; staff do not touch it. There is very little infrastructure — 95 percent of the program’s budget goes directly to beneficiaries. They get their cash, then patronize local businesses that sell food, clothing or school supplies. (The program is hugely popular with small businesses in poor towns. This is one way Oportunidades is helping even people who are not its beneficiaries, and one response to the complaint that simply redistributing money can’t possibly do anything.)
Susan Parker, an economist who has studied Oportunidades’ effects extensively, echoes a common perception that the program is remarkably clean. “It’s partly because of the design. The money gets to individuals — there isn’t any intermediary. It’s not the local politician who distributes money.”
Some readers asked whether society as a whole reaps benefits from conditional cash transfer programs. It does. Giving money to the very poor creates more economic growth than keeping it in the pocket of the wealthy, because the beneficiaries spend it all, and spend it on things their almost-as-poor neighbors make and sell. They also use it as microcredit to start businesses — I visited one woman in Veracruz, Mexico, whose living room was half-full of Tupperware-style products that she sells door to door, all bought with her Oportunidades money. The program drives growth in other ways, as more educated workers are more productive. Preventive health checkups are also cost-saving, as they can head off expensive chronic illnesses later. One very important benefit is that in the Mexican villages I visited, the program has liberated women to a certain extent; wives now have their own money and must get out of the house to attend meetings.
Oportunidades can save Mexicans from extreme poverty, but $123 a month does not put a family on easy street.
Then there is the contraception issue. A lot of commenters felt the solution to third-world poverty was for the poor to have fewer children. Some phrased the request crudely — RC from Minnesota, for example, called the poor “unneeded but passively supported humans.” Let us, however, find a less repellent way to express the sentiment that people should have the power to limit their families to the number of children they can support. If that’s your goal, then this is your program, folks. There are caps on the benefits, so it does not encourage larger families — in Mexico, for example, three children is the limit. More important, education for girls is the most effective contraceptive. The more educated the mother, the fewer the children.
If Oportunidades is so great, many readers wrote, why are so many Mexicans still coming illegally to the United States? One reason is that Oportunidades can save them from extreme poverty, but $123 a month does not put a family on easy street. Prices in Mexico are lower than in the U.S., but not by much. It doesn’t diminish the importance of Oportunidades to say that this is not the only program Mexico needs. Mexico desperately needs jobs. (Mexicans don’t come to the U.S. for free stuff. They come to work.) One of the fears of Santiago Levy, the program’s pioneer, is that without more job creation, Oportunidades could simply be producing a better-educated workforce for the United States.
The American Question
The column on Tuesday was not about the United States. But the vast majority of the comments focused on the questions of whether a conditional cash transfer program could work in the United States, and how this idea compares to welfare. Welfare (the version that gets people’s hackles up) used to be unlimited and not conditioned — the so-called nanny state. But this was abolished by President Clinton, who changed it to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. As the name says, TANF is temporary, and is conditioned on working. It is an example of tough love, the “daddy state” — government as lifestyle supervisor and enforcer of civic responsibilities for those considered to be in need of such supervision. Conditional cash transfers are another version of the daddy state, only the conditions are different: give your children a better start so they may be less poor tomorrow.
It is not clear whether a conditional cash transfer program could work in the United States. The pilot of Opportunity NYC was not a huge success — it is still being evaluated, so it’s probably too soon to tell. It may be that certain aspects of the program work well, and could be refined and tested again in another pilot. There are precedents for the success of similar ideas. According to Gordon Berlin, the president of the social research organization MDRC, programs in Wisconsin, Minnesota and two provinces of Canada that gave the poor extra money for working were effective. All brought increases in work and earnings as well as benefits to the schooling of the participants’ young children.
Poverty in the United States is not the same as poverty in Mexico, and the reasons people are poor are different. The U.S. already does have many anti-poverty programs, although some don’t work very well or are deliberately designed to be hard to access. There is plenty of hunger in America — let’s not minimize people’s suffering or buy the argument from several commenters that the well-off have a monopoly on hard work or virtue. Among the comments were several that betrayed a profound lack of knowledge and interest about what it’s like to be poor.
Most poor people are desperately trying to do the best for their kids with the hand they’ve been dealt. A lot of people hold down several jobs at once and are still poor. As Ann from Milwaukee, reminds us, earning $10 an hour, which is more than the minimum wage, means your yearly salary is about $24,000. “Try to pay rent, transportation, utilities, daycare, food for a family on that.”
But the fact is that the poor here are, by global standards, not so poor. The very poor in other countries build their own houses of mud or logs and oilcloth, live on dirt floors and sleep on straw, own a single sari or one pair of pants and eat only tortillas and beans or only rice and chiles. They must struggle against their circumstances to acquire the basics of survival and human dignity. These are the people that conditional cash transfer programs are designed to help. And they are helping them by the millions.

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/helping-the-worlds-poorest-for-a-change/

POVERTY: To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor

TINA ROSENBERG : January 3, 2011
  Bruno Domingos/Reuters : An apartment building in front of the Rocinha shantytown in Rio de Janeiro.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world.
Today, however, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.
Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent of earners. (see this great series in Slate by Timothy Noah on American inequality) Productivity among low and middle-income American workers increased, but their incomes did not. If current trends continue, the United States may soon be more unequal than Brazil.
A single social program is transforming how countries all over the world help their poor.
Several factors contribute to Brazil’s astounding feat. But a major part of Brazil’s achievement is due to a single social program that is now transforming how countries all over the world help their poor.
The program, called Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) in Brazil, goes by different names in different places. In Mexico, where it first began on a national scale and has been equally successful at reducing poverty, it is Oportunidades. The generic term for the program is conditional cash transfers. The idea is to give regular payments to poor families, in the form of cash or electronic transfers into their bank accounts, if they meet certain requirements. The requirements vary, but many countries employ those used by Mexico: families must keep their children in school and go for regular medical checkups, and mom must attend workshops on subjects like nutrition or disease prevention. The payments almost always go to women, as they are the most likely to spend the money on their families. The elegant idea behind conditional cash transfers is to combat poverty today while breaking the cycle of poverty for tomorrow.
Most of our Fixes columns so far have been about successful-but-small ideas. They face a common challenge: how to make them work on a bigger scale. This one is different. Brazil is employing a version of an idea now in use in some 40 countries around the globe, one already successful on a staggeringly enormous scale. This is likely the most important government antipoverty program the world has ever seen. It is worth looking at how it works, and why it has been able to help so many people.
In Mexico, Oportunidades today covers 5.8 million families, about 30 percent of the population. An Oportunidades family with a child in primary school and a child in middle school that meets all its responsibilities can get a total of about $123 a month in grants. Students can also get money for school supplies, and children who finish high school in a timely fashion get a one-time payment of $330.
A family living in extreme poverty in Brazil doubles its income when it gets the basic benefit.
Bolsa Familia, which has similar requirements, is even bigger. Brazil’s conditional cash transfer programs were begun before the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but he consolidated various programs and expanded it. It now covers about 50 million Brazilians, about a quarter of the country. It pays a monthly stipend of about $13 to poor families for each child 15 or younger who is attending school, up to three children. Families can get additional payments of $19 a month for each child of 16 or 17 still in school, up to two children. Families that live in extreme poverty get a basic benefit of about $40, with no conditions.
Do these sums seem heartbreakingly small? They are. But a family living in extreme poverty in Brazil doubles its income when it gets the basic benefit. It has long been clear that Bolsa Familia has reduced poverty in Brazil. But research has only recently revealed its role in enabling Brazil to reduce economic inequality.
The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank are working with individual governments to spread these programs around the globe, providing technical help and loans. Conditional cash transfer programs are now found in 14 countries in Latin America and some 26 other countries, according to the World Bank. (One of the programs was in New York City — a small, privately-financed pilot program called Opportunity NYC. A preliminary evaluation showed mixed success, but it is too soon to draw conclusions.) Each program is tailored to local conditions. Some in Latin America, for example, emphasize nutrition. One in Tanzania is experimenting with conditioning payments on an entire community’s behavior.
The program fights poverty in two ways. One is straightforward: it gives money to the poor. This works. And no, the money tends not to be stolen or diverted to the better-off. Brazil and Mexico have been very successful at including only the poor. In both countries it has reduced poverty, especially extreme poverty, and has begun to close the inequality gap.
The idea’s other purpose — to give children more education and better health — is longer term and harder to measure. But measured it is — Oportunidades is probably the most-studied social program on the planet. The program has an evaluation unit and publishes all data. There have also been hundreds of studies by independent academics. The research indicates that conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil do keep people healthier, and keep kids in school.
In Mexico today, malnutrition, anemia and stunting have dropped, as have incidences of childhood and adult illnesses. Maternal and infant deaths have been reduced. Contraceptive use in rural areas has risen and teen pregnancy has declined. But the most dramatic effects are visible in education. Children in Oportunidades repeat fewer grades and stay in school longer. Child labor has dropped. In rural areas, the percentage of children entering middle school has risen 42 percent. High school inscription in rural areas has risen by a whopping 85 percent. The strongest effects on education are found in families where the mothers have the lowest schooling levels. Indigenous Mexicans have particularly benefited, staying in school longer.
Bolsa Familia is having a similar impact in Brazil. One recent study found that it increases school attendance and advancement — particularly in the northeast, the region of Brazil where school attendance is lowest, and particularly for older girls, who are at greatest risk of dropping out. The study also found that Bolsa has improved child weight, vaccination rates and use of pre-natal care.
When I traveled in Mexico in 2008 to report on Oportunidades, I met family after family with a distinct before and after story. Parents whose work consisted of using a machete to cut grass had children who, thanks to Oportunidades, had finished high school and were now studying accounting or nursing. Some families had older children who were malnourished as youngsters, but younger children who had always been healthy because Oportunidades had arrived in time to help them eat better. In the city of Venustiano Carranza, in Mexico’s Puebla state, I met Hortensia Alvarez Montes, a 54-year-old widow whose only income came from taking in laundry. Her education stopped in sixth grade, as did that of her first three children. But then came Oportunidades, which kept her two youngest children in school. They were both finishing high school when I visited her. One of them told me she planned to attend college.
Outside of Brazil and Mexico, conditional cash transfer programs are newer and smaller. Nevertheless, there is ample research showing that they, too, increase consumption, lower poverty, and increase school enrollment and use of health services.
If conditional cash transfer programs are to work properly, many more schools and health clinics are needed. But governments can’t always keep up with the demand — and sometimes they can only keep up by drastically reducing quality. If this is a problem for medium-income countries like Brazil and Mexico, imagine the challenge in Honduras or Tanzania.
For skeptics who believe that social programs never work in poor countries and that most of what’s spent on them gets stolen, conditional cash transfer programs offer a convincing rebuttal. Here are programs that help the people who most need help, and do so with very little waste, corruption or political interference. Even tiny, one-village programs that succeed this well are cause for celebration. To do this on the scale that Mexico and Brazil have achieved is astounding.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/to-beat-back-poverty-pay-the-poor/?ref=opinion

POVERTY: poor people in wealthy countries

POOR people—the destitute, disease ridden and malnourished “bottom billion”—live in poor countries. That has been the central operating assumption of the aid business for a decade.





Send Western taxpayers’ money, quickly
The thesis was true in 1990: then, over 90% of the world’s poor lived in the world’s poorest places. But it looks out of date now. Andy Sumner of Britain’s Institute of Development Studies* reckons that almost three-quarters of the 1.3 billion-odd people existing below the $1.25 a day poverty line now live in middle-income countries. Only a quarter live in the poorest states (mostly in Africa).
This change reflects the success of developing countries in hauling themselves out of misery. In 1998 the World Bank classified 61 countries (out of 203) as low-income (meaning an annual income per head of less than $760, in money of that era). In 2009 the number had shrunk to 39 out of 220. India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria all moved to middle-income status during that time (China passed the threshold earlier). But even excluding China and India, the share of global poverty accounted for by other middle-income countries tripled between 1990 and 2008, to 22%. Other figures support Mr Sumner’s finding. Of the world’s undersized children (a good indicator of malnutrition), 70% live in middle-income countries.
In one sense it hardly matters to a destitute Nigerian or Indian that his country has been reclassified by some distant development bank. But it raises hard questions about whether foreign aid should be for poor people or poor countries. Britain, for example, has a rule that 90% of aid is supposed to go to the poorest countries. Aid charities strongly support that focus. The result, as taxpayers’ money runs scarce, is that donors have consigned programmes in middle-income countries to a “bonfire” says Alex Evans, a former adviser at Britain’s Department for International Development. Yet these are the countries where the vast majority of the poor live.
On September 29th, Bob Zoellick of the World Bank called for a profound “change [in] how we conduct development research”. President Barack Obama wants a rethink of America’s muddled aid programme. Mr Sumner’s data make that look overdue. Poverty, he says, may be turning from being an international distribution problem into a national one. Most middle-income countries, through national conditional-cash-transfer schemes such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família, have proved better at helping their own poor than anything invented and financed by the international aid industry. Giving is easy. Thinking can be a lot harder.
The thesis was true in 1990: then, over 90% of the world’s poor lived in the world’s poorest places. But it looks out of date now. Andy Sumner of Britain’s Institute of Development Studies* reckons that almost three-quarters of the 1.3 billion-odd people existing below the $1.25 a day poverty line now live in middle-income countries. Only a quarter live in the poorest states (mostly in Africa).
This change reflects the success of developing countries in hauling themselves out of misery. In 1998 the World Bank classified 61 countries (out of 203) as low-income (meaning an annual income per head of less than $760, in money of that era). In 2009 the number had shrunk to 39 out of 220. India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria all moved to middle-income status during that time (China passed the threshold earlier). But even excluding China and India, the share of global poverty accounted for by other middle-income countries tripled between 1990 and 2008, to 22%. Other figures support Mr Sumner’s finding. Of the world’s undersized children (a good indicator of malnutrition), 70% live in middle-income countries.
In one sense it hardly matters to a destitute Nigerian or Indian that his country has been reclassified by some distant development bank. But it raises hard questions about whether foreign aid should be for poor people or poor countries. Britain, for example, has a rule that 90% of aid is supposed to go to the poorest countries. Aid charities strongly support that focus. The result, as taxpayers’ money runs scarce, is that donors have consigned programmes in middle-income countries to a “bonfire” says Alex Evans, a former adviser at Britain’s Department for International Development. Yet these are the countries where the vast majority of the poor live.
On September 29th, Bob Zoellick of the World Bank called for a profound “change [in] how we conduct development research”. President Barack Obama wants a rethink of America’s muddled aid programme. Mr Sumner’s data make that look overdue. Poverty, he says, may be turning from being an international distribution problem into a national one. Most middle-income countries, through national conditional-cash-transfer schemes such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família, have proved better at helping their own poor than anything invented and financed by the international aid industry. Giving is easy. Thinking can be a lot harder.
The thesis was true in 1990: then, over 90% of the world’s poor lived in the world’s poorest places. But it looks out of date now. Andy Sumner of Britain’s Institute of Development Studies* reckons that almost three-quarters of the 1.3 billion-odd people existing below the $1.25 a day poverty line now live in middle-income countries. Only a quarter live in the poorest states (mostly in Africa).
This change reflects the success of developing countries in hauling themselves out of misery. In 1998 the World Bank classified 61 countries (out of 203) as low-income (meaning an annual income per head of less than $760, in money of that era). In 2009 the number had shrunk to 39 out of 220. India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria all moved to middle-income status during that time (China passed the threshold earlier). But even excluding China and India, the share of global poverty accounted for by other middle-income countries tripled between 1990 and 2008, to 22%. Other figures support Mr Sumner’s finding. Of the world’s undersized children (a good indicator of malnutrition), 70% live in middle-income countries.
In one sense it hardly matters to a destitute Nigerian or Indian that his country has been reclassified by some distant development bank. But it raises hard questions about whether foreign aid should be for poor people or poor countries. Britain, for example, has a rule that 90% of aid is supposed to go to the poorest countries. Aid charities strongly support that focus. The result, as taxpayers’ money runs scarce, is that donors have consigned programmes in middle-income countries to a “bonfire” says Alex Evans, a former adviser at Britain’s Department for International Development. Yet these are the countries where the vast majority of the poor live.
On September 29th, Bob Zoellick of the World Bank called for a profound “change [in] how we conduct development research”. President Barack Obama wants a rethink of America’s muddled aid programme. Mr Sumner’s data make that look overdue. Poverty, he says, may be turning from being an international distribution problem into a national one. Most middle-income countries, through national conditional-cash-transfer schemes such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família, have proved better at helping their own poor than anything invented and financed by the international aid industry. Giving is easy. Thinking can be a lot harder.

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=3604033512937490051

POVERTY: Brazil and President Lula's approach

As Brazil's first working-class president, Lula has become a global symbol of the fight against poverty and the rise of emerging markets. The combination of market-friendly policies with expanded social welfare programs has given Lula the reputation of a moderate leftist, and his policy mix is seen as a model for much of Latin America.
-- Born in the poor semi-arid northeast, Lula moved with his family to Sao Paulo, where he shined shoes and worked as a delivery boy. He never finished high school but learned the metalworker's trade. He rose to national fame as a union leader who helped combat the 1964-1985 military dictatorship and in 1980 founded the leftist Workers' Party. He lost three presidential races before winning the October 2002 election.
-- His flagship welfare program, Bolsa Familia, has received international recognition as one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce extreme poverty and boost local economic activity. The program pays families a monthly stipend, provided they get regular medical check-ups and send their children to school.
-- Under Lula, Brazil's economy grew at its fastest pace in decades and some 20 million people emerged from poverty. He has given the central bank a free hand to conduct monetary and currency policy, but during the 2008/09 global financial crisis he stepped up government-centered economic policies, such as boosting state enterprises and low-cost loans.
-- Lula pursued a much more proactive foreign policy than any of his predecessors, acting as a mediator in regional conflicts, leading a peace-keeping mission in Haiti, and playing a key role in global trade and climate negotiations. Brazil helped foment a common front of developing nations to help counterbalance interests of the United States and Europe in the Doha trade round.
-- At home he is criticized for having turned a blind eye to corruption and becoming friendly with rogue leaders in Venezuela and Iran. A charismatic, grandfatherly figure, Lula is one of the few global leaders with a popularity rating around 80 percent toward the end of his second term.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2427652420100824

POVERTY: Brazil's Bolsa Familia

The main Brazilian meal is lunch, which the children eat free at school. When they’re home, their parents often eat chicken (a whole one goes for $5 and can last several meals) or salami (about a dollar a pound) cooked with inexpensive vegetables they pick up at the market and which occupy a drawer in their largely empty, ancient refrigerator.
Fruit is a luxury. Alves da Silva’s favorite, watermelon, goes for just over $2 at a nearby market. “If I could, I’d buy one every Sunday,” she said.
Other household expenses include a canister of cooking gas ($16), one of the first things the family buys when they receive their monthly payment. If it runs out before the month is out, they switch to a tiny wood-burning stove.
Household necessities like detergent, soap, toothpaste run about $20 a month. Clothing comes from hand-me-downs and the numerous nearby stores advertising “Items 5 Reais and Up,” though most cost precisely five reais ($2.75). That makes budgeting a breeze even for Alves da Silva, who only made it to second grade. She quickly reels off the math: six kids, 10 reais per outfit, 60 reais ($33) to dress the family, shoes not included.
In all, the family makes things work on a monthly income that includes the $70 from Bolsa Familia and about $50 to $100 from informal, temporary or odd jobs.
Until recently, Alves da Silva held a somewhat regular — if sub-minimum wage — job, making $65 a month for working four days a week as a housekeeper and babysitter. But she lost that job after she burned herself with an iron (at her home) and took a month to recover. Dos Santos has dispersed CVs to local chain stores and supermarkets, but has had no luck. (Since he has only a fourth-grade education — and no computer, of course — he paid $1 to have a basic resume created for him at the local shop.)
Often, jobs come from luck. As Dos Santos walked into the center of Tabuleiro on a recent evening, he ran into a bakery owner he knows named Adriano.
“Hey man, can you stop by the bakery tomorrow?” said Adriano.
“Sure,” responded Dos Santos.
And voila, a day’s work that would net him $11 to $14. His wife currently has been working a twice-a-week housekeeping gig, which nets her $8 to $11 a day up to twice a week.
The state helps out with health care and medication, free — if not stellar — at the local clinic. And though Dos Santos claims life in the city is “every man for himself,” friends and family do help out: Dos Santos gets around on bicycle that was a gift from his mother, who lives nearby. And Alves da Silva goes the gym every night at 7 p.m., the $13 a month membership paid for by her close friend, Janicleide’s godmother.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/brazil/100610/bolsa-familia?page=0,1