I normally don’t do numbers. But in this post, I will have to refer to numbers because wealth and poverty have to be understood quantitatively too. So let’s do the numbers. It is an amazing fact that extreme poverty has… Read More ›
Poverty
Pro-poor policies work
Pro-industrial policies promote industry, pro-health policy promote health, pro-education policies promote education. So it is natural that India’s pro-poor policies — and let’s be very clear that every single one of India’s economic policies have been pro-poor — work and… Read More ›
Global Poverty and the Cell Phone
A magazine article in the New York Times of April 13th has the rather mistaken and misleading title “Can the Cell Phone End Global Poverty?” (Hat tip: Abhishek Sarda). The article title is misleading because it doesn’t even remotely attempt… Read More ›
Reality Disconnect
There appears to be a thriving cottage industry which is primarily engaged in churning out shallow pieces of journalistic garbage. The pieces detail a particular person’s or family’s struggles and then juxtapose it in some dramatic way with perceived overall… Read More ›
The Sustaining of Poverty
The Oxfam America site asks In a World of Abundance, Why Hunger? (July 8, 2002) Poverty and hunger are the world’s greatest challenges 1.2 billion people–one out of five–live on less than $1 a day. More than 800 million people… Read More ›
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
In a land where reportedly every generalization is trivially true, one generalization holds non-trivially and with overwhelming force. It is this: Indian governments are pro-poor. Every policy that any government ever espouses, fundamentally it always is pro-poor, irrespective of any… Read More ›
Culture Matters
Economists conventionally list land, labor and capital as the three factors of production. If combined appropriately using the right technology, stuff is produced. This produced stuff is then the total income. Productive efficiency is important of course for a society… Read More ›
The Poor as a Fertile Source of Slave Labor
I have never been able to shake off the conviction that there must be a very good economic reason for why there are so many poor people around the world. You may say that I am crazy to connect what… Read More ›
Hunger in India
According to UN estimates, India has the largest number of hungry people. Over 200 million, or about one-fifth of India’s population, is chronically hungry. This is an apparent paradox in a country which is food-surplus on the aggregate. The Wall… Read More ›
The Persistence of Poverty
Economic analysis can be broadly categorized as either ‘positive’ or ‘normative.’ Positive analysis refers to the investigation of how things are, whereas normative analysis is concerned with how things should be. The former is supposed to be value-neutral whereas the… Read More ›
