Presidents and prime ministers in the West have made grandiloquent speeches about making poverty history for fifty years.
In 2000 the United Nations announced a series of eight Millenium Development Goals to reduce poverty, improve health and so on. The impact of such initiatives has been marginal at best.
Almost all of the fall in the poverty rate should be attributed to economic growth.
Fast-growing economies in the developing world have done most of the work.
Between 1981 and 2001 China lifted 680m people out of poverty.
Since 2000, the acceleration of growth in developing countries has cut the numbers in extreme poverty outside China by 280m
Between 1981 and 2010, China lifted a 680 million people out poverty—more than the entire population of Latin America. This cut the poverty rate in China from 84% in 1980 to about 10% in 2010.
The record of poverty reduction has profound implications for aid.
One of the main purposes of setting development goals was to give donors a wish list and persuade them to put more resources into the items on the list.
This may have helped in some areas but it is hard to argue that aid had much to do with halving poverty.
via Poverty: Not always with us | The Economist and The Economist
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