CHARTING PROGRESS

MUCH ADO...

At the Millennium Summit, world leaders promised to halve extreme poverty by 2015. This established a benchmark for measuring gains toward poverty eradication, a commitment taken in 1995 at the Social Summit with no target date attached. These meetings failed, however, to provide a common definition of “poverty”, making it difficult to judge progress.

For Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, “poverty must be seen as the deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely as lowness of incomes.”1 By such measure, if the people of a country are healthier, better educated, and have access to public services without discrimination, that country is making progress in reducing poverty.

Social Watch coalitions in 50 countries have been tracking the evolution of indicators that measure poverty in Sen’s sense and assessing the effectiveness of social policies in achieving set goals. The forthcoming Social Watch 2001 Report is a product of this work.

The charts on the cover of this booklet show how countries stand on key social indicators and how much progress they have made toward their goals. The story they tell is not a happy one. The latest statistics (1999) show that most countries are still far from achieving goals set for 2000. The second chart shows visible progress in the last decade, but momentum was slowed by the financial crisis. Many countries show no progress at all and some are worse off than they were ten years ago.

The world maps on the back cover indicate the extent of inequity by showing distribution of the world’s income. The income maps show annual gross domestic product (everything an economy produces in goods and services in a year) as volumes, with base surface proportional to population (the larger the base, the more people in the country) and height proportional to per capita income. The first map shows disparities among countries. The second shows distribution of income within some countries. Some Southern countries show a disproportionate amount of riches in the top 10% of the population. Others show fewer disparities than Sweden in terms of the share of the riches that the poorest get… but have very little wealth to distribute!

Once it was thought that “the tide will lift all boats” – that economic growth would eventually benefit the poor and all we had to do was wait. For many, however, the tide of globalization has become a tsunami with catastrophic consequences. What is good for the economy is no longer seen as necessarily benefiting the people, as the split between the World Economic Forum in Davos and the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre dramatically demonstrated in January 2001.

The proposed Tobin tax on international speculative transactions and other proposals on aid, debt, and investment will be taken up by the United Nations’ global conference on Financing for Development (see articles by Marina Ponti and Jens Martens). Many Southern leaders insist that “trade, not aid” will drive their countries out of poverty. But they are getting neither.

There has been much ado in the form of inspiring speeches. Now concrete action is badly needed. A look at the numbers of people suffering deprivation, a majority of them women and children, should suffice to convey a sense of urgency.

Roberto Bissio

Notes
1 Amartya Sen. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1999.