The Role of Trade in Ending Poverty looks at the complex relationships between economic growth, poverty reduction and trade, and examines the challenges that poor people face in benefiting from trade opportunities. Written jointly by the World Bank Group and the WTO, the publication examines how trade could make a greater contribution to ending poverty by increasing efforts to lower trade costs, improve the enabling environment, implement trade policy in conjunction with other areas of policy, better manage risks faced by the poor, and improve data used for policy-making.
Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.
Trade can dramatically improve women’s lives, creating new jobs, enhancing consumer choices, and increasing women’s bargaining power in society. It can also lead to job losses and a concentration of work in low-skilled employment. Given the complexity and specificity of the relationship between trade and gender, it is essential to assess the potential impact of trade policy on both women and men and to develop appropriate, evidence-based policies to ensure that trade helps to enhance opportunities for all. Research on gender equality and trade has been constrained by limited data and a lack of understanding of the connections among the economic roles that women play as workers, consumers, and decision makers. Building on new analyses and new sex-disaggregated data, Women and Trade: The Role of Trade in Promoting Gender Equality aims to advance the understanding of the relationship between trade and gender equality and to identify a series of opportunities through which trade can improve the lives of women.
Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 is the first of an annual flagship report that will inform a global audience comprising development practitioners, policy makers, researchers, advocates, and citizens in general with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. This edition will also document trends in inequality and identify recent country experiences that have been successful in reducing inequalities, provide key lessons from those experiences, and synthesize the rigorous evidence on public policies that can shift inequality in a way that bolsters poverty reduction and shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. Specifically, the report will address the following questions: • What is the latest evidence on the levels and evolution of extreme poverty and shared prosperity? • Which countries and regions have been more successful in terms of progress toward the twin goals and which are lagging behind? • What does the global context of lower economic growth mean for achieving the twin goals? • How can inequality reduction contribute to achieving the twin goals? • What does the evidence show concerning global and between- and within-country inequality trends? • Which interventions and countries have used the most innovative approaches to achieving the twin goals through reductions in inequality? The report will make four main contributions. First, it will present the most recent numbers on poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality. Second, it will stress the importance of inequality reduction in ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity by 2030 in a context of weaker growth. Third, it will highlight the diversity of within-country inequality reduction experiences and will synthesize experiences of successful countries and policies, addressing the roots of inequality without compromising economic growth. In doing so, the report will shatter some myths and sharpen our knowledge of what works in reducing inequalities. Finally, it will also advocate for the need to expand and improve data collection—for example, data availability, comparability, and quality—and rigorous evidence on inequality impacts in order to deliver high-quality poverty and shared prosperity monitoring.
This edition of the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity report brings sobering news. The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and its associated economic crisis, compounded by the effects of armed conflict and climate change, are reversing hard-won gains in poverty reduction and shared prosperity. The fight to end poverty has suffered its worst setback in decades after more than 20 years of progress. The goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, already at risk before the pandemic, is now beyond reach in the absence of swift, significant, and sustained action, and the objective of advancing shared prosperity—raising the incomes of the poorest 40 percent in each country—will be much more difficult. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversals of Fortune presents new estimates of COVID-19's impacts on global poverty and shared prosperity. Harnessing fresh data from frontline surveys and economic simulations, it shows that pandemic-related job losses and deprivation worldwide are hitting already poor and vulnerable people hard, while also shifting the profile of global poverty to include millions of 'new poor.' Original analysis included in the report shows that the new poor are more urban, better educated, and less likely to work in agriculture than those living in extreme poverty before COVID-19. It also gives new estimates of the impact of conflict and climate change, and how they overlap. These results are important for targeting policies to safeguard lives and livelihoods. It shows how some countries are acting to reverse the crisis, protect those most vulnerable, and promote a resilient recovery. These findings call for urgent action. If the global response fails the world's poorest and most vulnerable people now, the losses they have experienced to date will be minimal compared with what lies ahead. Success over the long term will require much more than stopping COVID-19. As efforts to curb the disease and its economic fallout intensify, the interrupted development agenda in low- and middle-income countries must be put back on track. Recovering from today's reversals of fortune requires tackling the economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 with a commitment proportional to the crisis itself. In doing so, countries can also plant the seeds for dealing with the long-term development challenges of promoting inclusive growth, capital accumulation, and risk prevention—particularly the risks of conflict and climate change.
Global value chains (GVCs) powered the surge of international trade after 1990 and now account for almost half of all trade. This shift enabled an unprecedented economic convergence: poor countries grew rapidly and began to catch up with richer countries. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, however, the growth of trade has been sluggish and the expansion of GVCs has stalled. Meanwhile, serious threats have emerged to the model of trade-led growth. New technologies could draw production closer to the consumer and reduce the demand for labor. And trade conflicts among large countries could lead to a retrenchment or a segmentation of GVCs. World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains examines whether there is still a path to development through GVCs and trade. It concludes that technological change is, at this stage, more a boon than a curse. GVCs can continue to boost growth, create better jobs, and reduce poverty provided that developing countries implement deeper reforms to promote GVC participation; industrial countries pursue open, predictable policies; and all countries revive multilateral cooperation.
"The paper presents a nontechnical summary of the current state of debate on the measurement and implications of global inequality (inequality between citizens of the world). It discusses the relationship between globalization and global inequality. And it shows why global inequality matters and proposes a scheme for global redistribution. "--World Bank web site.
Globalization - the growing integration of economies and societies around the world, is a complex process. The focus of this research is the impact of economic integration on developing countries and especially the poor people living in these countries. Whether economic integration supports poverty reduction and how it can do so more effectively are key questions asked. The research yields 3 main findings with bearings on current policy debates about globalization. Firstly, poor countries with some 3 billion people have broken into the global market for manufactures and services, and this successful integration has generally supported poverty reduction. Secondly, inclusion both across countries and within them is important as a number of countries (pop. 2 billion) are failing as states, trading less and less, and becoming marginal to the world economy. Thirdly, standardization or homogenization is a concern - will economic integration lead to cultural or institutional homogenization?
The World Bank Group has two overarching goals: End extreme poverty by 2030 and promote shared prosperity by boosting the incomes of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each economy. As this year’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity report documents, the world continues to make progress toward these goals. In 2015, approximately one-tenth of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, and the incomes of the bottom 40 percent rose in 77 percent of economies studied. But success cannot be taken for granted. Poverty remains high in Sub- Saharan Africa, as well as in fragile and conflict-affected states. At the same time, most of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries, which tend to have higher national poverty lines. This year’s report tracks poverty comparisons at two higher poverty thresholds—$3.20 and $5.50 per day—which are typical of standards in lower- and upper-middle-income countries. In addition, the report introduces a societal poverty line based on each economy’s median income or consumption. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle also recognizes that poverty is not only about income and consumption—and it introduces a multidimensional poverty measure that adds other factors, such as access to education, electricity, drinking water, and sanitation. It also explores how inequality within households could affect the global profile of the poor. All these additional pieces enrich our understanding of the poverty puzzle, bringing us closer to solving it. For more information, please visit worldbank.org/PSP
At the start of each decade the World Development Report focuses on poverty reduction. The World Development Report, now in its twenty-third edition, proposes an empowerment-security-opportunity framework of action to reduce poverty in the first decades of the twenty-first century. It views poverty as a multidimensional phenonmenon arising out of complex interactions between assets, markets, and institutions. This Report shows how the experience of poverty reduction in the last fifteen years has been remarkably diverse and how this experience has provided useful lessons as well as warnings against simplistic universal policies and interventions. It shows how current global trends present extraordinary opportunities for poverty reduction but also cause extraordinary risks, including growing inequality, marginalization, and social explosions. The World Development Report 2000/2001 explores the challenge of managing these risks in order to make the most of the opportunities for poverty reduction.
