The Poverty Debate

1
The Poverty Debate
2
Introduction

• Making of the Modern World
• Wealth and impoverishment of nations?
• Politics of equality but economic inequality?
• What does modernisation look like when viewed
  from elsewhere in the world?

3
Definitions

• A statistical measurement?
• The Poor are not Us
• Disempowerment
• Look at everything and write what you see. What
  you see is poverty.

4
Disaggregating Poverty

• Structural poverty
• Long-term poverty
• Conjunctural poverty
• Poverty as a temporary condition
• Land-rich poverty
• Land-scarce poverty

5
Poverty in 19th Century Africa

• Moral economy
• Kikuyu
• Exchange of land and labour
• Exchange of opportunity for former wealth and
  recognition of right of wealthy to rule in the
  present
• Land-rich conjunctural poverty
• Poor silenced
• Poor dependent on elite felt no obligation when
  ties broke down
• Crisis of colonial conquest

6
Poverty in Colonial Africa

• Colonies run for the economic benefit of colonial
  powers rather than the good of subjects
• Limits on competition
• Settler colonies
• Cash crop revolution
• Marketing boards
• Creation of land-scarcity
• Limited mobility
• Native Reserves

7
Poverty in Colonial Africa

• Creation of urban poverty
• Labour migration
• Fixed wages
• Post-1945
• Expansion of structural poverty
• Poverty and protest
• Mau Mau

8
Poverty in Post-Colonial Africa

• Promise of redistribution at heart of nationalism
• Nationalist parties as coalitions of elites and
  grassroots
• Influence of left on nationalism
• Cold War

9
Post-Colonial Poverty

• Differing policies
• Ghana
• Tanzania
• Kenya
• How different?
• Marketing boards
• Rapid urbanisation
• Similar outcomes
• Improvements in living standards
• Crisis of the 1970s

10
Post-Colonial Poverty

• Competing explanations
• Dependency theory
• Walter Europe, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
• Solution
• Self-sufficiency
• Tanzania
• Capital shortage
• Need to fill gap between necessary investment
  domestic savings
• Solution
• Greater integration into global economy

11
Post-Colonial Poverty

• Structural adjustment
• Liberalisation of economies
• Reduction of state involvement
• Increase in urban poverty?
• Decrease of state employment
• End of price-fixing of foodstuffs
• Inflation
• Privatisation
• Decrease in rural poverty?
• Prices set according to global markets
• Collapse of redistributive politics

12
Conclusion

• Did poverty worsen or improve in modern world?
• Change from conjunctural to structural poverty?
• View from periphery very different from that from
  industrialised countries
• Need for imperialism to be incorporated more
  fully into economic history