Poverty and development : the Human Development Report and the World Development Report, 1990

After the"adjustment decade"of the 1980s, attention in the 1990s seems to be turning once again to longer-term issues of development - particularly of poverty alleviation. Just as the 1980s were heralded by a series of reports on adjustment, so the 1990s have seen two major reports on poverty: World Development Report 1990: Poverty, by the World Bank, and Human Development Report 1990 by the UNDP. The author presents an overview of conceptual issues and the best policies for alleviating poverty, based on a review of these two reports. He poses basic questions on the definition and measurement of poverty, looks at what has actually happened to poverty in developing countries in the last three decades, and reviews policies to help alleviate poverty. The consensus represented in these two reports, he concludes, offers hope that the polarization of policy analysts into"camps"is a thing of the past - and that policies for the 1990s can be built on fundamental agreement about the basics: (a) that poverty alleviation requires growth, but growth is not enough; (b) that growth must be broad-based and labor-intensive, and must go hand in hand with targeted basic social expenditures; and (c) that the international community must do its share, by supporting these efforts in the 1990s through greatly increased capital flows to development countries.