IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/une/wpaper/20.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Growth is Failing the Poor: The Unbalanced Distribution of the Benefits and Costs of Global Economic Growth

Author

Listed:
  • David Woodward
  • Andrew Simms

Abstract

During 1990-2001, only 0.6 per cent of additional global income per capita contributed to reducing poverty below the $1-a-day line, down from 2.2 per cent during 1981-1990, and barely half the poor’s share of global income. Coupled with the constraints on global growth associated with climate change, and the disproportionately adverse net impact of climate change on the poor, this casts serious doubt on the dominant view that global growth should be the primary means of poverty reduction. Rather than growth, policies and the global economic system should focus directly on achieving social and environmental objectives.

Suggested Citation

  • David Woodward & Andrew Simms, 2006. "Growth is Failing the Poor: The Unbalanced Distribution of the Benefits and Costs of Global Economic Growth," Working Papers 20, United Nations, Department of Economics and Social Affairs.
    • Handle: RePEc:une:wpaper:20
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2006/wp20_2006.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dollar, David & Kraay, Aart, 2002. "Growth Is Good for the Poor," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 7(3), pages 195-225, September.
    2. Stephan Klasen, 2005. "Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction: Measurement and Policy Issues," OECD Development Centre Working Papers 246, OECD Publishing.
    3. Wagstaff, Adam, 2003. "Child health on a dollar a day: some tentative cross-country comparisons," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 57(9), pages 1529-1538, November.
    4. Ravallion, Martin & Chen, Shaohua, 2003. "Measuring pro-poor growth," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 78(1), pages 93-99, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Isabel Ortiz, 2007. "Social Policy," Policy Notes 6, United Nations, Department of Economics and Social Affairs.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic growth; income distribution; world inequality; poverty; environment; climate change;

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • Q56 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population Growth

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:une:wpaper:20. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Aimee Gao). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/desunus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.