In preparation of People's Health Assembly II - part 34
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ON POVERTY:
1. Sound economic policies are conducive to growth, but so are
sound social policies.
2. In countries where income inequality is low, growth is twice
as effective in reducing poverty as in countries with high in-
come inequality. In countries where the distribution of income
worsens during growth, the impact of growth on poverty is not
strong.
3. The impact of providing social services to the poor has been
less than expected, mainly because:
a) investments in health and education, for example, have grown
at a slower pace than the GDP has grown (for redistribution to
occur, what is needed is increasing the share of public spending
on poor people's needs);
b) the quality of the services expanded is poor;
c) interventions do not respond to the poor people's real needs;
d) there is no community involvement in making decisions about
these safety-net programs which do not attack the root causes of
poverty.
4. The effects of adverse external shocks such as volatile capi-
tal flows and falling terms of trade are not only transitory;
such shocks can lock people into poverty for the long term by
causing irreversible damage to children, for example (malnutri-
tion, abandoning school, etc). [Indonesia an example]
5. The total number of people living on less than $1 a day has
risen from 1.18 billion in 1987 to 1.2 billion (24% of the
world's population) in 1998; if one excludes China, the figures
are 880 million people in 1987 and 986 million (26.2% of the
world's population) in 1998.
6. Poverty is more than low income, a lack of education and poor
health. The poor are powerless to influence the social and eco-
nomic factors that determine their well-being (.or poverty) and
have their legal rights violated all the time.
7. Unresponsiveness of state institutions and corruption are ad-
ditional barriers to poverty alleviation. Needed are participa-
tory mechanisms to prevent the domination by local elites.
8. Poor people define their poverty in terms of lack of opportu-
nities, lack of power and lack of security. This broader defini-
tion of poverty requires a broader set of actions to fight it.
9. In international terms, industrial countries' protectionism
causes annual losses in welfare of more than twice the amount of
overseas development assistance.