President Nancy Birsdall, Senior Fellow Lant Pritchett, and Visiting Fellow Scott Morris are quoted in a New York Times piece on the feasibility of eradicating poverty.
At a news conference during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in late April, Jim Yong Kim held up a piece of paper with the year “2030” scribbled on it in pen. “This is it,” said Kim, the genial American physician who took over as president of the World Bank last summer. “This is the global target to end poverty.”
It sounds like the sort of airy, ambitious goal that is greeted by standing ovations but is ultimately unlikely to ever materialize. Development experts don’t see it that way, though. The end of extreme poverty might very well be within reach. “It’s not by any means pie-in-the-sky,” says Scott Morris, who formerly managed the Obama administration’s relations with development institutions. When I asked Jeffrey Sachs, the development economist, if the target seemed feasible, he said, “I absolutely believe so.” And Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, the powerful Washington policy group, told me, “In many ways, it’s a very modest goal.”
In part, this is because the bar is set very low. The World Bank aims to raise just about everyone on Earth above the $1.25-a-day income threshold. In Zambia, an average person living in such dire poverty might be able to afford, on a given day, two or three plates of cornmeal porridge, a tomato, a mango, a spoonful each of oil and sugar, a bit of chicken or fish, maybe a handful of nuts. But he would have just pocket change to spend on transportation, housing, education and everything else. The 1.2 billion people living in such extreme poverty, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, might own land, but they are not very likely to own durable goods or productive assets — things like bicycles — that might help them raise themselves out of poverty. In such families, about half or three-quarters of income goes toward food.
Of course, making it above the $1.25-a-day mark doesn’t guarantee a white picket fence and a Caddy in the driveway — indeed it doesn’t even guarantee a proper meal. For that reason, some economists have criticized the bank for setting its targets too low. “It’s small,” Pritchett says. “It’s penurious. It’s charity-like. It’s not development.” He says that the billions who live on a bit more than $1.25 a day are still deeply impoverished by any reasonable standard. “Why are we focused on a line, above which nothing happens, set by some technocrats in Washington?” Another 1.2 billion live on between $1.25 and $2 a day, an only slightly less dire form of deprivation.
For the poor living in poor countries, particularly the profoundly unstable ones, gains have been harder-fought and slower, a trend that the World Bank’s own economists describe as worrisome. But that is not to play down the successes so far. In 2008, for the first time since the bank started measuring the statistics, the number of people living in dire poverty and the dire-poverty rate fell in every region around the world. Extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa has at last dipped below the 50 percent mark. Still, many within the development world doubt the ability of NGOs to cure the world’s most troubled nations of their woes. “I don’t think we have a recipe for fixing the Congo or South Sudan or Afghanistan,” says Birdsall, of the Center for Global Development.
In an interview, Kim sounded energetic and optimistic about the prospect that the great brute force of growth would keep on lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty — and about the bank’s role in nursing the process along. Given how big the world is, how big the goal is and how diverse economies are, it would take a multipronged approach, he said. For parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it would mean huge electrification projects. For China, it would mean smarter urbanization and clean energy. For India, it would mean enormous infrastructure investments that the World Bank could help finance. It also might mean replicating what has worked for those big, quick-growing emerging economies in poorer, poverty-stricken developing ones.