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No end to poverty

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  • Tim Unwin

Abstract

This commentary is designed to provide a critique of Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime, highlighting in particular the difficulties that arise from his focus on absolute poverty and his proposed recipe for its elimination. It begins by emphasising the many strengths of Sachs' arguments, but then suggests that these could usefully be tempered by greater attention to relative conceptualisations of poverty and the ethical grounds upon which his arguments are based. Six main issues are subsequently addressed: his use of the notion of a ladder of development; his concentration on countries rather than people; his understandings of geography and of history; his relative lack of attention to social and cultural dimensions of development; the inability of poor countries to absorb the levels of aid that he proposes; and the damage caused by suggesting that it is indeed possible to end poverty.

Suggested Citation

  • Tim Unwin, 2007. "No end to poverty," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(5), pages 929-953.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:43:y:2007:i:5:p:929-953
    DOI: 10.1080/00220380701384596
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    1. repec:wbk:wbpubs:6967 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Moore,Mike, 2003. "A World without Walls," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521827010.
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    Cited by:

    1. Ferguson, J.E. & Huysman, M.H., 2009. "Between ambition and approach: towards sustainable knowledge management in development organizations," Serie Research Memoranda 0003, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics.
    2. Owen Gohori & Peet van der Merwe, 2020. "Towards a Tourism and Community-Development Framework: An African Perspective," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(13), pages 1-35, June.
    3. Andrew Brooks & Clare Herrick, 2019. "Bringing relational comparison into development studies: Global health volunteers’ experiences of Sierra Leone," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 19(2), pages 97-111, April.
    4. Ka Yi Fung, 2017. "How Economic Dependency Was Created Through the WTO: A Case Study of South Korea," Journal of Developing Societies, , vol. 33(4), pages 469-487, December.
    5. Cuenca-García, Eduardo & Sánchez, Angeles & Navarro-Pabsdorf, Margarita, 2019. "Assessing the performance of the least developed countries in terms of the Millennium Development Goals," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 54-66.
    6. Koehne, Florian & Woodward, Richard & Honig, Benson, 2022. "The potentials and perils of prosocial power: Transnational social entrepreneurship dynamics in vulnerable places," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 37(4).

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