Globalization has eradicated great power war, dedev reverses
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Poverty Scenario Answers2AC – A2: PovertyGrowth solves poverty, it’s decreasing now Lal ’04 (Deepak, James S. Coleman Professor of International Development Studies @ UCLA, former Research Administrator at the World Bank and advisor for international agencies and governments, including the governments of India, Kenya, Korea, Sri Lanka, and Brazil, and the author of numerous books on economic development and public policy including The Poverty of Development Economics and Unintended Consequences, “IN PRAISE OF EMPIRES: GLOBALIZATION AND ORDER” pg. 122-126, jj) One of the abiding complaints against global capitalism has been the asser tion that, while it might promote general prosperity, it leads to greater inequality and the perpetuation of poverty. Fortunately, an old colleague of mine at the World Bank, Surjit Bhalla, who now sensibly runs an economic research and asset management firm in New Delhi, has given the lie to this assertion in an important book, Imagine There‘s No Country.1° Bhalla’s response to the complaint concerns the misuse of statistics, as well as their unreliability in many cases,” to support ideological conclusions about the state of the world. . Having obtained access to the poverty data till recently closely held by the World Bank and utilizing the Bank’s own methodology, Bhalla has meticulously estimated the headcount ratio (HCR) of the world’s poor. He finds that the proportion of people in the developing world living below $1 a day in terms of 1 993 purchasing power declined from 30 percent in 1987 to 13.1 percent in 2000, which is a much steeper decline than the reduction from 28.7 percent to 22.7 percent estimated by the World Bank.12 Xavier Sala-i-Martin, using the same data but slightly different methods, reaches much the same conclusion.’3 There has been a substantial reduction in poverty in the developing world in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the period when China’s opening under Deng Xiaoping, India’s economic liberalization in 1991 , and the gradual move away from planned to market economies in Latin America brought much of the Third World into the global economy. Outside the former Soviet empire, Africa—which has not integrated into the world economy and faces serious problems of governance--is the only region where Poverty has risen. Contrary to Stiglitz, the World Bank, and the antiglobalization brigade, in the latest period of globalization which really began with the 1980s, there has been a historically unprecedented decline in Third World Poverty. Bhalla, Using other data assembled by World Bank researchers, also computes how world Poverty had changed from 1820 till 2000. Figure 4 shows the changing head Count ratio (HCR) of Poverty and the number of poor in the world, Using the same Poverty line and methods of estimation he used for the Post Second World War Poverty numbers. Table 1.0 shows the changes in income and the reductions in the world HCR of Poverty for various periods From these,, three periods can be broadly identified: the nineteenth century period of globalization; the interwar period from 1929 to 1950 when the process of globalization stalled and Was reversed; and the period from 1950 forward when a new liberal international economic order was reconstructed As the Third World did not join this till ‘1980, the true second period of globalization is from 1980. Bhalla then calculates what he calls the “poverty reduction yield of growth,” the decline in the poverty head count ratio brought about by each 10 percent growth in per capita incomes—the bang for the buck in poverty reduction. From table 1.0 it is apparent that while the head count poverty ratio was falling during both the nineteenth century and. current periods of globalization, it rose during the period of antiglobalization in the interwar period. Since then, during the second period of globalization, it has fallen, but the highest yield in terms of poverty reduc tion has been since 1980 when the Third World started to integrate with the world, economy. The only region where poverty has not declined is Africa, which is also the region which is least integrated into the world economy. The largest decline in poverty has been in Asia, but Latin America and the Middle East have also seen declines in poverty. So poverty today is by and large an African problem, and it is the behavior of its predatory elites and their additional failure to join the globalization bandwagon which explains most of today’s poverty. Thus, in 1980 when the number of the world’s poor peaked, the majority of the world’s poor were in Asia; today they are in Africa. What about income inequality? Much of the controversy has con cerned the gap between rich and poor countries for which Bhalla finds that on a statistically sound reckoning, the gap declines from a factor of 23 in 1960 to 95 in 2000. Moreover, the largest decline in the gap between rich and poor countries has occurred in the two decades of globalization since the 1980s. But, while some might find it of interest to see how the gap between rich and poor countries has changed with globalization, from the viewpoint of judging the changes in the welfare of people, we need to see how the incomes of the world’s citizens have changed over the years. For this we need estimates of the distribution of income between all the people of the world, ignoring their place of residence (their countries). Bhalla has esti mated these distributions for the post—Second World War period as has Sala i-Martin based on the same data but using somewhat different methods. Their results are very similar. . A summary statistic to measure inequality is the Gini coefficient.’5 If there is complete equality, the Gini will be zero; if complete inequality, it will be 1. Figure 5 shows Bhalla’s estimates of the Ginis for both the income and consumption of all the world’s individuals from 1950 to 2000. These show a U shaped pattern till 1980 as world individual inequality peas, and then a steep decline from the 1980s, the period of globalization. So that by 2000 world indi vidual inequality was at its lowest since the previous trough in 1958. No better picture can demonstrate the equalizing forces of globalization. Finally, Bhalla also shows from his estimated income distributions for all the individuals in the world for 1960, 1980, and 2000 that there is the same equalizing effect of post 198O globalization. But more important, he shows that there has been a massive growth of a world middle class in the era of globalization since 1980. Most of this growth in the middle class has occurred in Asia. In 1960 only 6 percent of the world’s middle-class popula tion was Asian, while in the industrialized world it was 63 percent. Today, 52 percent of the world’s middle class is Asian. 16 This is the miracle that globa. ization in the most populous part of the world has wrought. Since the Great Divergence began with the rise of the West in the eleventh century, the gap in per capita incomes between the West and the East (charted in fig. 1) began its inexorable course, leading to rising world inequality, it is only in the current era of globalization that this gap has begun to decline, it was the rise of the West and the stagnation of the great Asian civilizations which was responsible for this growing gap. It was only with their most recent attempt to modernize and catch up with the West by belatedly, and still half-heartedly, following classical liberal policies that these ancient civilizations have begun to close the gap. Growing global inte gration has been the motor for this transformation, Thus, contrary to the chants of the protesters marching through the streets of Seattle or Genoa, and despite the many financial crises which have plagued the developing world, globalization has been good for the world’s poor and has reduced global inequalities. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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