Report concludes that state action that facilitates tax avoidance and evasion may amount to a violation of human rights.

The first chapter of Academics Stand Against Poverty Chapter in Latin America was launched on August 20, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City.

Read the full article on the Guardian website.

The UN’s High-Level Panel has now issued its detailed recommendations for global poverty alleviation efforts to replace the Millennium Development Goals project, which expires 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 vigorously addressing climate change, among numerous other proposals (http://www.post2015hlp.org/). 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

ASAP President Thomas Pogge has an original prescription for the post-MDG agenda, according to The Guardian.

Pogge argues that the post-2015 global development framework must be fundamentally different than the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) it is replacing. According to Mark Tran\’s post on Poverty Matters, the Guardian\’s development blog, Pogge sees two major failings in the MDGs: lack of ambition and lack of accountability for developed countries. With the MDGs, deeply unambitious poverty alleviation goals were masked by shifting methodology for poverty measurement. The framework also failed to put clear demands on developed countries to contribute to poverty alleviation. MDG 8, the only goal that applies to the developed world, is entirely devoid of measurable targets.

Pogge argues that the persistence of poverty can to a large extent be attributed to global practices, like trade protectionism, corporate tax dodging, and arms export, that can only be stopped by developing countries. In his view, a truly effective post-MDG agenda must target these practices through global reform goals, coupled with precise and consistent goals and indicators for poverty alleviation.

Read the full post on Poverty Matters.

This \’virtual roundtable\’ features interviews with four prominent commentators on development and global poverty:

Varun Gauri is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank; Branko Milanovic is a lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department; Thomas Pogge is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University; Gustav Ranis is the Frank Altschul Professor Emeritus of International Economics at Yale University

Interviews by Gilad Tanay

Here are Thomas Pogge\’s closing comments at the “Impact: Global Poverty” meeting to launch ASAP in the UK, held at the University of Birmingham. He offers thoughts on the global potential of ASAP, as well as pitfalls to avoid. / Start with the thought that the central purpose of ASAP is to reduce poverty. Upstream from this purpose we must ask: what is poverty, what are we to measure our work against? Here, it is important to communicate with poor people themselves. Poor people may not make a strong distinction between poverty and other vulnerabilities; they may see lack of resources as intimately intertwined with vulnerability to violence, for example, and with indignities suffered from officials. Maybe we should then also see their problem in broader terms.

Professor Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosopy and International Affairs at Yale, is a political philosopher who has published widely on Kant and in moral and political philosophy, including books on John Rawls and global justice. His book World Poverty and Human Rights is widely regarded as one of the most important works on global justice. Professor Pogge talks about a non-profit organization he leads called Incentives for Global Health and its new flagship proposal the Health Impact Fund (HIF). The HIF offers an innovative way of stimulating research and development of new medicines in order to provide them to patients — especially those in the developing world — at low prices.

ASAP president Thomas Pogge spoke at TEDx Yale on the connection between market incentives and poverty alleviation:

Board member Gilad Tanay spoke at the same TEDx event discussing the ethics of being born in an unfair world: