The UN\’s High-Level Panel has now issued its detailed recommendations for global poverty alleviation efforts to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015. The panel, headed by UK Prime Minister David Cameron and including political leaders, diplomats and poverty experts from around the world, has called for the eradication of severe poverty by 2030 and for a more robust response to climate change, among numerous other proposals. The recommendations will form the basis for dialogue between UN member states over the next two years about a new global agreement on poverty and development.
ASAP is interviewing experts on global poverty about the new recommendations and the likely legacy of the MDGs. In this first installment in the series, contributing writer Amy Gordon speaks with Thomas Pogge, ASAP President and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. Prof. Pogge has written extensively and critically on the Millennium Development Goals, in particular on the measures of poverty used in assessments of poverty reduction in recent years (see Thomas Pogge, Politics As Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
1) What did you hope to see in the recommendations for the MDG replacements?
What would do most toward bringing the changes needed for the emancipation of poor people worldwide is a concerted effort by the most powerful countries to implement supranational institutional reforms that would reduce or eliminate the headwinds that unjust supranational arrangements are now blowing against the poor. Unsurprisingly, this is not a topic the grandiosely named High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons has chosen to highlight in its report A New Global Partnership. But their Report repeatedly expresses commitments to solidarity and shared responsibility, and these commitments, if they are to be more than lip service, oblige the Panel in its future work to specify plausible institutional reform goals that could be implemented by the more affluent countries and, if so, would reduce that headwind. I have outlined some examples of plausible institutional reform goals here.
2) Do you find the document explored any radically new directions from the MDGs, or that much of the past approach remains?
Much of the past approach remains, but the need to make things sound fresh and novel did lead to some shifts in emphasis. There is a welcome move from the language of reduction to that of eradication of poverty — though this is confined to \”extreme\” poverty, which the World Bank has defined ever more narrowly by replacing the original threshold of $1.00 per person per day in 1985 US-dollars (as referenced in MDG-1) first with a lower $1.08 per person per day in 1993 US-dollars and then with an even lower $1.25 per person per day in 2005 US-dollars. There is a welcome nod in the direction of human rights. And there is brief recognition of the immense socio-economic, civil and political inequality characterizing our planet — though it comes without acknowledging the hugely important fact that inequality has greatly increased since 1990 (the baseline year of the MDGs) so that much of the benefit that the world\’s poor could have derived from growth in the global average income was eaten up by a compression of their share of global household income. Like politicians and the compliant mass media, A New Global Partnership is celebrating progress toward the MDGs as a great victory when in fact the world\’s poor would have done considerably better if they had been allowed merely to participate proportionally in global economic growth. The story is told in the following Table, which is based on global household income distribution data kindly provided to me by Branko Milanovic, principal economist in the World Bank\’s Development Research Group, in a personal e-mail communication of 7 December 2012.
Table: Evolution of the Global Household Income Distribution at Market Exchange Rates
|
Segment of World Population |
Share of Global Household Income, 1988 |
Share of Global Household Income, 2008 |
Absolute Change in Income Share |
Relative Change in Income Share |
| Richest 5 per cent |
42.872 |
45.751 |
+2.879 |
+6.7% |
| Next 15 per cent |
42.958 |
39.137 |
–3.821 |
–8.9% |
| Second fifth |
8.958 |
9.782 |
+0.824 |
+9.2% |
| Middle fifth |
2.843 |
3.236 |
+0.393 |
+13.8% |
| Fourth fifth |
1.518 |
1.428 |
–0.090 |
–6.0% |
| Poorest fifth |
0.851 |
0.666 |
–0.185 |
–21.8% |
3) The recommendations emphasize that paradigm shifts are overdue. Considering the role which the international economic order plays in perpetuating severe global poverty, do you think the recommendations go deep enough in their recommendations for institutional reforms?
On my reading of the Report, I have not found any recommendations that aim at anything that might deserve to be called institutional reform. Perhaps the closest the authors get is in this passage:
\”Developed countries have to go beyond aid, however. There are signs that the money illegally taken out of sub-Saharan Africa and put in overseas tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions is greater than all the aid money that has been put in. Some of this is money-laundering of bribes and stolen funds, and some is to evade taxes. Much more can and should be done to stop this. It starts with transparency in all countries. Developed countries could be more actively seizing and returning assets that may have been stolen, acquired corruptly, or transferred abroad illegally from developing countries. The average OECD country is only \”largely compliant\” in 4 of 13 categories of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations when it comes to detecting and fighting illicit financial flows. If the money is openly tracked, it is harder to steal. That is the motivation behind the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a voluntary global standard that asks companies to disclose what they pay, and has governments disclose what they receive. Other countries could adopt EITI and follow the example of the United States and the EU in legally compelling oil, gas and mining companies to disclose financial information on every project. Developed countries could also pay more attention to exchanging information with developing countries to combat tax evasion. Together, they can also crack down on tax avoidance by multinational companies through the abuse of transfer pricing to artificially shift their profits across international borders to low-tax havens. When developed countries detect economic crimes involving developing countries, they must work together to make prosecuting such crimes a priority.\”
This passage highlights a crucially important topic. But it fails to acknowledge the active participation of important developed countries (Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus, the United Kingdom and the United States), their subnational units (Delaware, the City of London) and their dependencies (Anguilla, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Montserrat, the Netherlands Antilles and the Turks and Caicos Islands) in massive tax evasion and money laundering. The real-world problem is not that rich countries fail to pay enough attention to embezzlement and tax evasion in developing countries. The problem is that they run a global financial system that enables shell companies, tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions to be important elements of how millionaires and multinational corporations run their operations. Our politicians protect this infrastructure to help these well-connected elites engage in tax evasion and corruption. And, as it widely known, this same infrastructure is also used by terrorists, drug dealers and human traffickers.
4) What impacts do you think that the recommendations to target illicit financial flows, for example, will have in terms of improving the economic outlook for international development?
This will crucially depend on the nature of this targeting. If it\’s just a pious admonition to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative or to be more active in seizing and returning stolen assets, then it will have little or no effect. What is needed is the worldwide abolition of secret bank accounts — people who do not wish to be associated with certain financial assets for tax purposes should not be able to control and spend these assets either. We also need automatic information exchange among tax authorities. This is likely to move forward as a result of the recent G20 Summit, but the key question is whether the developing countries will be included even though rich countries have little to gain from their collaboration. The undesirable alternative would be a set of reciprocal agreements among rich states to stop protecting one another\’s tax cheats with the rich countries continuing to attract capital by protecting those who are cheating only developing countries of tax revenues.
5) What do you think of the document\’s account of the distribution of responsibilities between international, national, and local bodies? Does it indicate workable foundations on which to build effective institutions that promote international and national accountability?
By and large, this distribution of responsibilities is poorly spelled out. In one of the better passages, the Report says rightly that \”developed countries… have special responsibilities in ensuring that there can be no safe haven for illicit capital and the proceeds of corruption, and that multinational companies pay taxes fairly in the countries in which they operate. And, as the world\’s largest per-capita consumers, developed countries must show leadership on sustainable consumption and production and adopting and sharing green technologies.\” But what exactly are these responsibilities? Is it enough for each rich country to supervise the activities of banks in its own jurisdiction, for example, or must these rich countries together force the world\’s tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions to cooperate? Without a clear specification of responsibilities, each actor will favor the most minimal interpretation of its own responsibilities — something that has been very much in evidence during the ongoing MDG period.
6) One of the most remarkable targets in the document is the proposal to end extreme poverty by the year 2030. How meaningful would it be to the very poor if, fifteen years from now, everybody had access to income above the $1.25 benchmark and above their respective (2015) national poverty line?
I have already indicated that this would be much more meaningful if we had left the international poverty line at its original level of $1.00 per person per day in 1985 US-dollars. Instead, this poverty line was lowered first to $1.08 in 1993 US-dollars and then to $1.25 in 2005 US-dollars — equivalent to just $0.69 in 1985 US-dollars. Still, even getting everyone above this latest abysmally low poverty line would, obviously, be better (other things equal) than the alternative. But it also matters how responsibility for achieving such a \”zero goal\” is allocated. Some of the poorest countries still have very high poverty rates, and they could not achieve the very large required poverty reductions without substantial support from wealthier countries: through aid and even more importantly through supranational rules that are less hostile to the needs of poor populations.
We should also remember how very narrow the World Bank’s crude money-metric standard is by ignoring many of the hardships that constitute poverty in the real world: the lack of safe water, of proper sanitation, of basic education, of personal security, of leisure time and of access to health care and public officials; the scourges of debt bondage and child labor; and the discrimination against women and girls both within their households and in the wider world. All these factors are completely ignored when one merely ascertains whether a household\’s income or expenditure has as much purchasing power per person per day as $1.25 had in the United States in 2005. The Bank’s poverty measurement exercise gives us a very incomplete picture of the evolution of world poverty and, relatedly, gravely distorts the incentives that ought to motivate policy makers at the national, subnational and supranational levels.
7) Do you see any openings for other potentially (more) fruitful or constructive approaches to measuring poverty and outcomes in the document (such as the capabilities approach) that could be more deeply explored and utilized?
- (Followup: e.g. the report notes that the MDGs had tended to leave out the most extremely poor; it emphasizes building resilience and economic opportunities, specifically securing rights to land, property, and other assets; tracking all levels of income and vowing \”end poverty in in many of its other forms\”. Can these new directions help to overcome the pitfalls of the income metric?
With a team of colleagues in Australia and collaborators in six poor countries, I have just concluded a three-year participatory exploration of what poverty means to poor people themselves. We are now writing up the results of this work, including our proposal for a Gender-sensitive Deprivation Measure (GDM). Like the work of Sabina Alkire in Oxford, who works quite explicitly within a capability framework, we have come to conceive poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon. However, in contrast to Alkire — who was constrained by her decision to develop a poverty measure that could be populated with existing data — we have arrived at a measure that is individualized, gender-sensitive, scalar and genuinely participatory.
The word \”individualized\” signifies that our measure of poverty focuses on individual human beings rather than on households. This is especially important for capturing information about the intra-household distribution of benefits and burdens which other measures ignore by simply assuming that each household member is as poor as the household as a whole.
This innovation already makes our measure sensitive to the way women and girls are often discriminated against within their household. But the second adjective, \”gender-sensitive,\” signifies more than that, namely that deprivations for men and boys and women and girls may be disproportionately experienced in a range of dimensions that are not commonly included in multidimensional measure of poverty, such as voice in one\’s community, freedom from violence, access to contraception, and leisure time. We have systematically explored these differences and worked them into our measure so as to avoid the common problem that hardships of great concern to women and girls are marginalized just because they are not especially important from a man\’s point of view.
The third adjective, \”scalar,\” signifies that we distinguish, in each dimension of poverty, different degrees of deprivation. In a sense, the World Bank and Sabina Alkire do the same; but they then throw all this scalar information away. The World Bank determines the purchasing power parity equivalent of a household\’s average income in 2005 US-dollars, but its poverty tracking exercise then uses only the information of whether the result is below $1.25 or not. So, for the Bank, if 20 percent of a population is living just below the poverty line, on $1.24 per day, then this is more poverty than if 10 percent of this population were living far below the poverty line, on $0.85 per day. Alkire’s method courts the same problem twice. First, there is a cut-off in each dimension of poverty — for example, people with 5 and 12 years of schooling are equally counted as schooled and people with 0 and 4.5 years of schooling are equally counted as unschooled. Second, she then counts a household as poor if it is deprived in one-third of all (weighted) dimensions or more. This leads to implausible conclusions. Compare for example a person who falls far below the threshold in just under one third of the dimensions with another who in a third of the dimensions is very slightly deprived. Clearly the former is poorer. But Alkire’s method will classify only the latter as poor.
The fourth adjective \”genuinely participatory,\” finally, signifies that we have built our measure of poverty from the bottom up through three rounds of field work at 18 impoverished sites in six countries: Angola, Fiji, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique, and the Philippines. Starting from largely unstructured conversations about poverty, this field work has gradually refined the input of poor people into a workable measure of poverty or better: deprivation.
8) Some of the targets aim at total elimination or achievements (such as the goal to end extreme poverty) or ensuring every child\’s access to primary lower education. Many other goals are partial (and their numbers or proportions are yet undetermined). The document emphasizes a balance between ambition and realism, but how do we determine which goals are achievable and which are over-ambitious?
You need to differentiate here. The goal of ensuring that the poorest 40 percent of humanity receive at least a proportional share of global economic growth is hardly ambitious: if income inequality remained constant, it would remain true indefinitely that it would take the incomes of 175 of them to match the income of a single person in the richest 5 percent. And of course this very modest goal is eminently achievable — how hard can it be to ensure that the poorest 40 percent continue to get at least 2.1 percent of global household income? Still, this very modest goal may not be realistic. It was not achieved in the 1988–2008 period, when the poorest 40 percent suffered a 12-percent decline in their tiny share of global household income. And it may not be achieved in the next 20 years either, assuming that the elites within the richest 5 percent will continue to expand their share. Should we conclude, then, that protecting the share of the world\’s poor from compression is \”unrealistic\” and \”over-ambitious\”? I think not. We should require feasibility, of course. But in a case like this, where the only serious obstacle to achieving a morally compelling goal is the entirely unreasonable greed of existing elites, we should not shrink that goal to accommodate these elites but, on the contrary, insist on that perfectly feasible goal even if we have little hope of holding the line. The morally serious people of this world may not be able to defeat injustice, but this is no reason to accept injustice, to stop identifying injustice clearly and forcefully and to urge focused mobilization toward its eradication.
9) In general, do you see any significant differences between the new 12 targets and the MDGs, especially in terms of their scope, measurability, and achievability?
In the respects that matter, this list is no improvement over the MDGs. There is lack of clear definition of the dimensions in which progress is supposed to be achieved. No methods are specified for measuring the extent to which progress will be achieved. No independent experts are envisioned who — politically independent and unexposed — would monitor such progress. Most regrettably, the goals are once again a wish list only. Goals worthy of the name would be assigned to specific agents, making clear the concrete tasks each such agent is supposed to get done. Take, for example, the new 4a: \”End preventable infant and under-5 deaths.\” At whom is this instruction directed? What efforts does it require from states acting domestically, from states acting beyond their own borders, from international agencies and organizations, from pharmaceutical companies, from agribusinesses, from resource-extracting firms, from other multinationals, from affluent citizens? Without any hint of an answer to these questions, each competent agent and agency will easily support adoption of the general \”goal\” and then look to the others for relevant action. And the most influential agents, who would be best placed to advance the objective, will be best able to dominate public opinion to divert attention away from themselves. This is precisely what happened with the MDGs, where the poorest countries ended up being held responsible for their huge deprivation rates not coming down fast enough: one of the poorest countries might be blamed for not getting its hunger rate from 60 to 30 percent, while an upper-middle-income country could rest easy with the rather less demanding task of getting its hunger rate down from 2 to 1 percent.
10) As a philosopher, to what extent (if any) do you see any particular types of economic philosophies or approaches represented or endorsed by the document? How may these theoretical influences impact the direction of its pragmatic goals? Or do you find the discussion is instead ideologically inclusive or agnostic, and pragmatically geared to achieve its concrete targets?<
I can discern no serious normative reflection in this document. I also don\’t think the document sets concrete targets (for this, clear definitions, measurement methods, and monitoring agents would need to be specified). Relatedly, the document is not geared to achieve success. It is geared to show that our politicians care and thereby meant to preempt any protest that might reasonably arise from the scandal that a majority of the world\’s population is still living in life-threatening poverty which could today so easily be avoided by raising their share of global income from around 3 to 5 or 6 percent.
11) The document makes many references to fairness and equity, arguing that its 5 transformative paradigms are the \”right, smart, and necessary thing to do.\” Do you notice any shifts in the ways in which the international development discourses have been talking about justice, and how do justice-based considerations impact assigning responsibilities and accountability for pragmatic targets?
I cannot notice any shift from, for example, the 2000 Millennium Declaration. Both documents make positive references to justice but leave entirely open what might be meant by this word. The word occurs often in lists, with freedom, security, peace and such. But it has no substantive role in the document. And the same is true of \”fairness\” and \”equity.\”
12) Now that the initial recommendations are in place, what would you keep or modify about them?
I have set out the kinds of goals I would like to see the world adopt in response to your question 1 above. If goals must take the form chosen in this Report, then I would ask that all targets be clearly defined, measurement methods specified, and independent experts appointed for the monitoring tasks. Most importantly, it must be clearly specified who is supposed to do what toward achieving the goals. Especially the most powerful and influential agents must be given clear tasks and responsibilities — and tasks not merely in the arena of development assistance but tasks that are to be taken into account in all their policy and institutional design decisions, both domestic and especially international as well. A good start would be to commission experts\’ written assessments of the impact specific such decisions can be expected to have on the world’s poor.
13) The recommendations emphasize participation and inclusivity at all levels of deliberation and implementation and makes particular references to taking advantage of the data revolution. What impacts do you believe academics may have in the upcoming deliberations and implementation process?
It would be good if committed academics had a role in formulating the new goals to make them sufficiently ambitious and precise (in terms of definition, measurement and monitoring). Academics can also play a valuable role in providing an independent second opinion on the evolution of the targeted dimensions of deprivation. Governments will not want to lose control over the official tracking, and they will once again pressure their intergovernmental agencies to beautify the trends. But academics can at least organize themselves to provide a second opinion to the public and the media about how much progress is really being achieved.