The World Bank suddenly discovers 400 more million poverty-ridden people
by Damien Millet and Éric Toussaint
Global Research <http://www.globalresearch.ca>, September 15, 2008
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10225
The World Bank recently acknowledged significant mistakes in its figures
concerning poverty in the world. Indeed, while “the WB's estimates of
poverty are improved thanks to more reliable data on the cost of
living”, the outcome is a head-on questioning of statistics produced by
this institution, which has been facing a serious legitimacy crisis for
several years: all at once the WB has just found out that 400 million
more people live in poverty than earlier thought. In other words more
than half of the sub-Saharan population!
This reflects the lack of reliability of statistics published by the WB
and shows that their main objective is to back up the neoliberal
policies imposed by its own experts the world over. As can be read in
its press release,[1] 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in
four) were living on less than US$ 1.25 a day in 2005, while previous
estimates were around 1 billion. Yet the WB still finds grounds for
rejoicing, since what matters in its eyes is not the number but the
proportion of poor people. Why is this? Because with a rampant world
demography, the latter figure can more easily suggest improvement: if
for instance the number of poor people does not increase, the proportion
will automatically fall with the passing years.[2]
This is why the Millennium Development goal is to reduce by half the
proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day between 1990 and
2015. But given the WB's huge mistakes in its accounts, the set of
current international policies against poverty collapses. Structural
adjustment policies (reducing social budgets, cutting costs in the field
of health and education, an agriculture geared to export with consequent
reduction of staple food crop cultivation, relinquishing food
sovereignty, etc.) that have been enforced by the IMF and the WB since
the early 1980s have seriously worsened living conditions for hundreds
of millions of people throughout the world.
There has been a lot of criticism of the WB in this respect since Thomas
Pogge, professor at Columbia University, wrote recently: The World
Bank's accounting policies are most questionable. We have good reason to
think that with a more credible method we would observe a more negative
trend and more widespread poverty. […] As long as the WB's current
method and the data it produces are used by international organisations
and university research on poverty, the problem cannot really be
considered seriously.[3]
The WB has exposed its weakness both statistically and politically. More
than ever our objective must be threefold: turning away from the logic
of structural adjustment, doing away with the WB, and developing a new
international institutional architecture.
Damien Millet, spokesman for CADTM France (Committee for the
Cancellation of Third World Debt, www.cadtm.org), author of L’Afrique
sans dette, CADTM/Syllepse, 2005.
/Eric Toussaint, President of CADTM Belgium, author of Banque du Sud et
nouvelle crise internationale, CADTM/Syllepse, 2008./
/Article in french:
//http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10154/
<http://www.mondialisation.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10154>/ /
Translated by Christine Pagnoulle in collaboration with Judith Harris
[1] See http://go.worldbank.org/C9GR27WRJ0
[2] See Thomas Pogge
www.etikk.no/globaljustice/oslo_Global_Justice_mainlecture.doc
<http://www.etikk.no/globaljustice/oslo_Global_Justice_mainlecture.doc>
[3] www.cadtm.org/spip.php?article3282
<http://www.cadtm.org/spip.php?article3282>
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