When Everything Else Fails, Say No To Poverty

Crucially, the rise in loans in recent years has been evenly spread across countries of different income groups, with no significant changes in the proportion of loans going to any particular income group between and This means many countries with high poverty levels and low government revenues are receiving large amounts of ODA loans. As well as being delivered in a variety of modalities, ODA is channelled by and through a complex network of agencies and actors.

Most donors have a dedicated aid agency or development specialists in foreign affairs ministries to disperse ODA. However, certain donors such as the UK are making a conscious effort to push spending increasingly via other departments. With growing emphasis on the role of the private sector in promoting development, it is expected that bilateral DFIs may in future account for a larger proportion of ODA see Chapter 3. This may include core funding carried over from previous years or, in the case of development banks, amounts drawn from profits on lending activities.

Over half of all ODA is channelled via public sector institutions. For aid not channelled via the public sector, the great majority is implemented by international rather than local actors. These proportions of total ODA have remained almost static since comprehensive data became available as channel of delivery began to be reported by donors in Donors and implementing agencies have committed to providing more humanitarian funding as directly as possible to local and national actors who are regularly the first to respond in humanitarian crises.

The channel of delivery refers to the first implementing partner of the ODA disbursement, which has implementing responsibility over the funds. There are variations in aggregate totals when looking at different sets of countries, with less ODA to countries at risk of being left behind being channelled through government institutions than is the case for other countries.

In fact, the proportion of ODA channelled via the public sector in countries being left behind has declined noticeably since To some extent this is unsurprising as the poorest and most vulnerable countries may have weaker government institutions, if present at all, via which ODA can be administered. However, this is not the case for all countries being left behind, some politically fragile countries may have functioning subnational institutions.

Yet their low levels of government revenue make ODA channelled via their government institutions all-the-more vital if they are to be empowered to lead their own development agendas. Data is for ODA supports a wide range of activities and health, infrastructure and governance-related sectors consistently receive the largest amounts. Chart is indexed from showing percentage rise in humanitarian aid and all other ODA for subsequent years.

Focusing in on development ODA, a broad range of sectors receive significant amounts of aid, with notable trends related to a number of the sectors that should be the greatest priorities to ensure no one is left behind. This means the share of total ODA going to education slipped from 8. Other social services social services excluding health and education saw the slowest growth, with spending rising well below the rate of ODA as a whole.

Although there is no data specifically on ODA to social protection, ODA to social and welfare services, a subdivision of other social services that largely comprises spending on social protection, is tracked. Data on ODA support for social protection programmes may improve in coming years as the OECD has updated its data to allow donors to track spending on social security, pensions and other social protection schemes in the form of cash or in-kind benefits. This is particularly pertinent since the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation made country ownership one of its stated principles for effective development.

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Chart excludes humanitarian assistance, in-donor refugee costs, debt relief, other commodity assistance, multisector ODA and ODA not specified to a sector. When focusing in on different countries, there are clear variations from the aggregate trends on sector allocations. Many of these variations are to be expected. However, looking at sectors that are particularly significant to ensuring the people furthest behind are lifted out of poverty, there are some surprising trends.

The poverty bands were drawn for each group to contain similar amounts of total ODA to allow the analysis to demonstrate that differences in total volumes are not the main source of any differences in sector allocations. With increasing focus on donors attracting private sector investment in developing countries, it is also important to acknowledge trends in ODA spending on business and industry in developing countries. At present countries with the lowest levels of poverty are receiving large amounts of ODA targeted at these sectors, meaning investments are primarily targeting where there is the least risk and greatest chance of receiving a profitable return.

If this is the case, it should incentivise donors to redeploy ODA to countries and sectors that are otherwise underfunded. Focusing in on the countries being left behind, allocations are largely as expected. Humanitarian aid and health dominate. They comprise almost half of gross ODA received and account for the largest increases see Figure 2. Meanwhile the proportion of ODA allocated to infrastructure, business and industry is substantially lower than for other countries.

Similarly, the trend in education follows the same surprising disparity seen when comparing countries based on income poverty levels. In fact, the amount being allocated to education in countries being left behind is falling. Another worrying trend is the decline in general budget support. A number of countries being left behind are characterised by fragility and political insecurity. This reflects trends of funding to fragile states more widely, where commitments in these areas have largely stagnated since Percentages on chart will not total to due to the exclusion of ODA to debt relief, general budget support and other sectors including donor admin costs and refugee hosting costs on the chart.

It is therefore important to acknowledge these volumes alongside ODA as, while classified differently, their purpose is aligned. Composition of data and definitions of development cooperation can vary by provider. Data remains sparse, patchy and incomplete for much South—South cooperation and volumes may be underestimated. There are also significant challenges in assessing where it is going, what it is being spent on and what impact it is achieving. While volumes are smaller than ODA or other resources such as foreign direct investment, they are clearly rising and these actors are likely to play an increasing role in the future.

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Investing to end poverty and close the gap between the poorest people and places and the rest is not just about scaling up total resources, but also the right types of finance for the right interventions. Increasing one type of finance will not automatically substitute the need for another. International financing often bypasses countries that need it most — those with the lowest domestic capacity and highest levels of poverty: Countries at most risk of being left behind receive a quarter of the flows per capita going to other developing countries excluding ODA.

The private sector will be key, but poor people cannot wait for international commercial investments — currently concentrated in countries with low risk and healthy business environments — to shift towards them. International financial and development finance institutions providing blended finance and de-risking are equally constrained from working in the poorest and most vulnerable places and will need changes to mandates to start mobilising resources to where they are needed most. Beyond volumes, identifying synergies between types of finance, by knowing what resources are available and how they are being used, can maximise impact and free up scarce ODA.

National public finance and ODA will continue to be central to investments directly focused on strengthening human capital development, which are being left behind by other forms of finance. Comparable subnational data across resources is limited but shows the gap in access to resources between the poorest people and others at local level. Better production, availability and use of local data can help guide where different resources are needed most. All resources have a role to play in, and a responsibility to contribute to, leaving no one behind ODA, while critical in its ability to target poverty directly, will not be enough to meet the ambitions of the Agenda for Sustainable Development Agenda ; it is far from the largest resource flow available and arguably not the most important.

Nor will the economic growth that resulted in achieving Millennium Development Goal MDG 1 early be sufficient if poverty is to be ended and inequality reduced. In the SDG era, all resources — public, private, local, national and international — have a role. They also have a responsibility to contribute to the universal goals. The gains made by achieving them will be felt by all, rich and poor, individual, household, corporation and government.

Shared benefits mean shared ownership of shared objectives — and shared responsibilities. But it is not just about numbers — it is more than a question of scaling up total financing. Simply increasing investments in developing countries will not result in the progress needed to achieve the twin SDGs 1 and 10, nor the other SDGs addressing human capital, infrastructure, security and the environment on which these two depend.

The quality of investments, backed up by political will driving the right choices, will also matter: While more financing is needed, it has to be the right type. This means it cannot be assumed that increasing one type of resource will be an automatic substitute for another. Looking beyond numbers means looking at the efficiencies and additional impact to be gained from different types of finance, and the actors that control them, working together, either within a defined framework of sequencing or layering, or a more loosely defined approach grounded in clear awareness of what other resources there are and what they are doing.

Within a burgeoning range of often interconnected sources, types, and modalities of funding and finance, each with their own sets of objectives, incentives and comparative advantages, strengthening their complementarity and building synergies will be as important as overall volumes.

Donors and governments need to know where their scarce concessional finance can make the most difference in the absence of other sources of investment. And other diverse actors need to know where opportunities are that both meet their own objectives and build momentum towards the SDGs. Having a clear picture of the overall landscape, including what type and scale of financing is being invested where, on what and at whose benefit, is thus a crucial step to more effective and impactful investments to end poverty. Domestic resources are the primary source of finance in developing countries and will be the key driver in country-level investments to end poverty.

China accounts for the vast majority of this difference, but even when excluding China the differences are impressive, with domestic public resources accounting for over nine times the volume of international official financing, and domestic commercial resources estimated by domestic credit to the private sector accounting for over seven times the volume of international commercial inflows to developing countries.

Combined, these domestic resources are 12 times those of international flows to developing countries. Data is for the most recent available year across all categories; this is , except for private finance mobilised via blending included in international commercial estimates and private development assistance included in international private estimates. Commercial resources are the largest category of financing in both domestic and international investments and flows Figure 3.

Notably, large proportions of international commercial resources ultimately flow out of developing countries. Data is for , except for private finance mobilised via blending and private development assistance. Development cooperation from other government providers includes data on disbursements of development cooperation from non-DAC members that report to the OECD DAC as well as data on disbursements of development cooperation from other government providers that do not report to the OECD DAC and for which data was compiled from national sources.

Domestic public resources are by far the largest development finance flow that can be invested directly in reducing poverty and be redistributive in nature through, for example, investments in social protection, health and education. Domestic public resources are managed by governments who hold ownership over national development agendas. They are responsible for aligning their expenditure with domestic development priorities and can strengthen accountability between decision-makers and the people that development efforts are supposed to serve.

Growth, however, has not been equally distributed across countries. Growth has almost halved since compared with the previous five years from an average annual growth rate of 7. Meanwhile it has not kept pace with economic growth — government revenue as a share of GDP has fallen across developing countries excluding China since , while levels in advanced economies have remained relatively constant in aggregate.

Countries whose government revenue data is not available for entire span of — are not included. Absolute volumes of domestic public resources are also lowest where poverty is highest. Achieving SDG1 will require progress at the individual level, but the countries needing to make the most progress are those with the least per capita resources. While the countries where most progress is needed to achieve SDG1 have low levels of revenue now, projections suggest that the gap in revenue levels between these and the rest is going to increase between now and Growth rates for high poverty countries will be only marginally higher than others, and low baselines mean wealthier countries are pulling further away.

Notably, in countries at risk of being left behind, domestic public resources are actually projected to grow more slowly than in other developing countries, meaning that if no action is taken the gap between these and other countries can only widen Figure 3. Chart is indexed from showing levels of change in non-grant government revenue for countries being left behind and other developing countries. Projections assume a constant government revenue-to-GDP ratio. Real GDP growth is available at the source until ; growth for is set equal to at the country level.

Beyond the aggregate level, the picture is less stark. Donors can work to assist governments in filling these tax gaps or expanding their potential, depending on the particular challenges faced. These challenges can be grouped into two distinct areas: The former refers to challenges faced by governments due to resource or capacity constraints, low levels of taxpayer compliance and tax abuses by multinational corporations practising aggressive tax planning strategies to lower tax burdens in developing countries and exploit weak administrations see Box 3.

The latter refers to challenges related to areas such as economic growth and structure e. While estimates of the volume of revenues lost to profit shifting are lower than ODA in countries that receive substantial aid levels such as Nigeria and Bangladesh , evidence suggests that on average, lower income countries lose more corporate tax revenue as a proportion of their GDP than higher income countries do. These barriers determine whether efforts to most effectively strengthen revenue mobilisation should focus on building government capacity, the wider enabling environment or a combination of the two.

For example, in countries such as Tanzania and Congo where current tax-to-GDP ratios are just below the minimum threshold identified by the International Monetary Fund IMF as adequate for providing basic services, 9 and where current capacity to collect taxes is lower than estimated potential capacity, efforts to support governments in overcoming challenges related to tax collection may be sufficient.

Domestic commercial resources are key to driving local and national economic growth. But with the right incentives and enabling environment they can also drive social and environmental progress through, for example, job creation and innovation. Domestic commercial actors are therefore key partners in the quest to achieve the SDGs and ensure no one is left behind. However, excluding China, growth in domestic commercial resources estimated by domestic credit to the private sector has been slowing down Figure 3.

Importantly, this type of financing also remains concentrated in a few countries. Only a handful account for most of the growth in domestic commercial resources outside China: In contrast, many countries, particularly those with high poverty rates, continue to lag behind on domestic commercial investments.

Based on latest available data from , countries where extreme poverty is highest have the least domestic commercial resources Figure 3. Bands were identified to contain as-even-as-possible numbers of countries. Similarly, in countries where poverty is projected to be highest and which are at risk of being left behind, the significance of domestic commercial resources continues to be lower than elsewhere — as a percentage of GDP they account, on average, for around a quarter of the levels found in other developing countries excluding China.

Between and , they accounted for just This is despite relatively rapid growth in recent years in several of the countries being left behind, which are also resource exporters e. With the right investments there is scope to strengthen the private sector in many of the poorest countries. Beyond emphasising blending and international private capital, donors can support governments to scale up the mobilisation of domestic commercial resources through private sector development interventions aimed at strengthening the broader enabling environment.

They can also do so by directly supporting domestic enterprises, with the ultimate aim of assisting countries in putting the structures and incentives in place to encourage sustainable and inclusive growth strategies. Given the lack of international, comparable, disaggregated data on domestic commercial resources, it is difficult to assess what this type of financing is being spent on and invested in. Yet initiatives are emerging to monitor the contributions of domestic businesses to the SDGs.

And the signs are encouraging. Key contributions were to sustainable cities SDG11 and responsible consumption and production SDG12 , while significant investments were also made in the human capital-focused SDGs 3 and 4 Figure 3. Initiatives supporting SDG3 were largely focused on ensuring accessibility and affordability of healthcare services, including through mobile technology. The largest proportion of SDG4-aligned investment went toward student scholarships and lending to employees who have insufficient resources to send their children to school.

No investments were recorded for SDGs 9, 10, 16 and International forms of financing — official, commercial and private — can complement domestic sources in supporting countries achieve national development goals and end poverty. And while other forms of international financing have been increasing overall in recent years, ODA will continue to be crucial in supporting the poorest countries and the sectors being bypassed by such financing, not least because of the timelines that must be acted on to ensure no one is left behind by Flows for which historical data is not available are excluded; these include private finance mobilised via blending and private development assistance.

The trends and distribution of different forms of international financing vary when looking at individual countries but two trends are clear: Except for ODA and official long-term debt, these differences are reflected across all flows Figure 3. Flows for which recipient-level disaggregation is not available are excluded. Scaled shapes represent per capita volumes of each type of finance flowing into the country groupings identified in the column headings.

As well as countries with high poverty and low revenues, international financing is bypassing those that need to be making the greatest progress to achieve the SDGs. Countries identified as most at risk of being left behind are among the smallest recipients of such flows except ODA. Data is all for , except for private finance mobilised via blending which is for latest year available.

Flows for which recipient level data is not available are excluded from this analysis. This is further illustrated in Table 3. Countries receiving zero for a flow are indicated as such from the source, this includes negative values set to zero for FDI. Non-concessional official flows comprising OOFs, export credits and official long-term debt can be an important source of additional finance, particularly in productive sectors that generate returns, such as infrastructure projects.

Yet the supply of such financing particularly non-concessional official loans must be considered first and foremost against the use and terms of the investments — although this remains difficult to do in the absence of disaggregated data on what this type of financing is being spent on. It should also be considered against the scale and scope of investments that would be foregone as a result of having to service increasing debt e. While North Africa saw substantial growth across all non-concessional flows, in sub-Saharan Africa the trend is mainly attributable to a nearly thirteen-fold increase in non-concessional lending by official creditors that is not reported as OOFs i.

Given the potential contribution of this type of financing to development outcomes, such growth need not, necessarily, be concerning. However, the rising outflows that this type of financing creates, through interest and capital repayments, is a concern to be monitored, particularly given growth is currently faster in the countries identified as being at risk of being left behind, including countries already identified as being at risk of debt distress e. DRC or already in debt distress e. Instability, conflict and insecurity are key drivers of poverty and barriers to progress, and as numbers of displaced people reach record levels year on year and as poverty becomes increasingly concentrated in fragile contexts, so a wider scrutiny of the full range of resources available to address these challenges, alongside a better understanding of how they are used, will be an essential baseline to drive synergies between different types of flows and expenditures.

Strengthening synergies will be as important as scaling up and targeting resources. Developing comparable data on how much is being spent by any government in any particular developing country — including apportioning of grants and official lending for military capital and services to certain places across a broad range of activities — is a substantial task yet to be undertaken.

Yet such spending could profoundly impact people in poverty. Having a baseline of what is being spent where will be one step towards identifying the synergies needed to harness this potential. International commercial flows can complement domestic commercial investments and, if appropriately directed, be important drivers of economic development and inclusive growth. However, to maximise their contribution to national development goals and to reducing poverty more broadly, they must also complement public efforts through, for example, supporting domestic revenue mobilisation by paying tax in the country of operation, adhering to environmental and social standards in their operations, and ultimately embracing the SDGs as a core aspect of their business models as some are already doing — see Box 3.

The Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which complements Agenda in particular in the area of financing, highlighted the need to expand international commercial financing, particularly FDI, to unfunded or underfunded places. Data shows these commitments are not being met. While international commercial finance to developing countries, including FDI, has increased in volume, it has actually been decreasing overall in countries identified at risk of being left behind.

International commercial finance in these terms has been falling since the late s across developing countries, but more steeply for countries being left behind — from 5. International private finance — made up here of remittances and international tourism receipts — has an important role in complementing other types of finance. Remittances tend to be countercyclical and can provide vital sources of income to poor households in crisis or smooth consumption patterns.

And a small-but-growing body of evidence suggests they can potentially contribute to development through, for example, local growth linkages. Instruments, such as diaspora bonds, seek to harness this potential further. International tourism — as highlighted in SDGs 8, 12 and 14 — can be a source of sustainable job creation and can promote local culture and products. While significant overall, international private financing remains concentrated in a relatively small number of countries that either have large diasporas or are popular tourist destinations.

When compared with the overall size of the economy, international private financing remains higher in countries being left behind. But, similarly to commercial sources of finance, since the late s it has been decreasing as a proportion of GDP faster in these countries compared with other developing countries — from 8. This compares with a more marginal drop from 3. Thus while international private flows will bring substantial benefit to some developing countries, they cannot be expected to be a substitute for national or international public finance for a number of the poorest countries and those at most risk of being left behind.

Data on private development assistance, including philanthropic spending, is still inadequate to paint a full, disaggregated picture of where and on what this type of financing is being spent.

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This makes it difficult to fully understand, and subsequently exploit, its synergies with other flows. Data also shows that similarly to ODA, international philanthropic financing targets poor and vulnerable places more than other sources of finance e. Some encouraging initiatives aim to strengthen the evidence base on this type of financing, such as Philanthropy Nigeria, which aims to reduce redundancy across Nigerian charitable organisations by making more data available on spending across the country.

Against the backdrop of the ambition and universality of Agenda together with concerns over stagnating aid flows, the private sector is increasingly seen as a solution for meeting the scale of investments needed to achieve the SDGs. Domestic governments and development partners alike are exploring blending and public—private partnership mechanisms to use public resources, including ODA, to leverage commercial financing toward development projects.

But while commercial actors have an important role to play in economic development and broader SDG achievement, fundamental differences in motivations and objectives prevent them from being automatic substitutes for national and international public finance. There should not be a trade-off between supporting investments in social or economic goals, and the former may be a precondition for the latter, especially in the poorest countries with low levels of human capital see Chapter 1.

Efforts to mobilise additional volumes of commercial funding into development should, therefore, not be separated from considerations around the risk of diverting scarce ODA resources away from interventions with known and more direct pro-poor outcomes. Investments in blended finance and public—private partnerships, while on an upward trend, remain short of what is needed. Limited growth can be attributed, among other things, to low mobilisation ratios and limited supply of commercially-viable projects.

Investments are also highly concentrated in a few large emerging markets where risk is low and the business environment strong — meaning their potential to reduce the gap between the poorest and other developing countries may be limited, and unlikely in the timeframe Agenda requires. These trends have also been driven by the risk-averse mandates of many international financial institutions that need to demonstrate profitability and maintain credit ratings.

Development finance institutions DFIs are becoming prominent actors in the financing landscape and have an important role to play in mediating co-financing and de-risking investments, as well as making direct investments themselves. Between and , the combined portfolios of European DFIs also grew: This does not mean there is no role for blended or public—private partnerships financing in the SDG agenda. Rather, their strength is in working in synergy with other concessional and commercial finance, focusing on where each is most effective in sectors and countries at different stages of development.

As seen in Chapter 2, aid is spent across a broad range of countries and not always the poorest. There are opportunities, for example, to build efficiencies and release aid in places where both blended finance and ODA are significant, particularly if mobilisation ratios are improved. And by amending mandates of international financial institutions to address disincentives towards risk, they can more effectively work in the places that need it most, particularly if they incorporate a focus on building strong government partnerships and a healthy business environment.

Most of the European DFIs included in this chart limit their investments to developing countries, except Finnfund, which can also invest in Russia and SIMEST, which can invest in all countries, thus their figures may include non-developing countries investments too. Investing aid through public—private partnerships should be subject to scrutiny just like all ODA.

If any initiative can demonstrate who is being included and who will directly benefit, with a clear emphasis on people in extreme poverty, then it should be considered a viable option. While volumes and the prominence of public—private arrangements increase and the total portfolios of DFIs rise, their impact on the lives of the poorest people remains unclear. Data on the volumes and distribution of blended finance, public—private partnerships and broader DFIs investments has been improving in recent years, 26 but important gaps remain that limit the ability to assess what public—private finance is being spent on and, crucially, who benefits.

Poor data and a lack of evidence has left a number of key questions unaddressed, including: What financing instruments are being used? What are the channels through which different mechanisms can benefit the poorest people in developing countries? What are the conditions for these channels to be most effective? What are the effects on local capital markets when international commercial capital is subsidised to encourage entrance into these markets?

Investments to end poverty 2018

How do public—private financing mechanisms respond to nationally identified development priorities? To ensure that public—private financing, and ODA within it, is put to its best possible use for Agenda and the leave no one behind imperative, it is crucial that action is taken to improve the quantity and quality of data and information available. Comparable sectoral data across types of finance flows is limited but can build a picture of which sectors are being prioritised by different actors and resources.

Non-concessional public and private flows target sectors that offer economic returns — such as productive sectors and infrastructure projects — more than social sectors such as health and education Figure 3. Just under a third of OOFs spending and private finance mobilised via blending targets infrastructure projects including energy, communications and transport.

FDI data is based on announcements of planned investments, not actual recorded flows. So, while substantial overall, wider sources of finance not only bypass the poorest countries and those most at risk of being left behind but also social sectors. This is not surprising. But when combined, the figures are stark: This means only 0. This is not to say that wider forms of financing, including commercial resources, cannot have an important impact on poverty reduction and human capital development.

For example, in , FDI projects in developing countries created 1. But while this may indeed signify future potential, the extent to which wider forms of finance are likely to provide the urgent investment needed for Agenda now — particularly in areas of human capital — is limited. In February , for example, the mobile industry was the first to commit as a whole to the SDGs and through the annual impact reports GSMA has been publishing since, has created a framework to assess its impact across them. And the Business Call to Action initiative continues to challenge companies around the world to develop inclusive business models to reach the poorest communities and engage people at the base of the pyramid as consumers, producers, suppliers, distributors and employees.

To date it has involved over companies working in 67 countries. Despite these encouraging signs, only a small proportion of businesses understand the importance of, and opportunities to be gained from, aligning to the SDGs. Knowing that aid goes to a particular country is a long way from understanding how it is reaching people in poverty.

Mapping FDI flows to the national level tells little about who is getting jobs and benefiting from these investments. The closer resources to people and communities can be tracked, the better their impact can be truly assessed and the substantial resources available harnessed and coordinated. And given the trend of devolution of government spending in many developing countries to local level, the more this subnational information can be shared locally, the more effective all investments can be.

Data on needs and resources at subnational levels is patchy at best and rarely allows for comprehensive cross-country analysis.

Data from the Spotlight on Uganda shows that the identified inverse relationship between poverty and the scale of different resources is often replicated at subnational level. Higher locally raised revenues from wealthier districts may be expected; higher proportions from international aid are not. Poverty data is for and relates to the proportion of people living under the national poverty line; data on the proportion of local government revenue that is locally raised and donor funded is for Investments from other sources such as FDI follow a similar trend.

This compares with areas beyond Kampala, where poverty levels are higher, which receive less and less stable FDI. Both governments and donors can take action based on better availability and use of local data, as Chapter 4 addresses. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation and obsession, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of self-destruction.

Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses. This book about two young men growing up in the Chicago projects is a modern classic of the genre. It took the author three years of reporting to tell their story. With this important work, he continues the stories of year-old Lafayette Rivers and his younger brother Pharoah as they confront tragedy on a daily basis.

For most people, the Great Crash of has meant troubling times. Not so for those in the flourishing poverty industry. These mercenary entrepreneurs have taken advantage of an era of deregulation to devise high-priced products to sell to the credit-hungry working poor, including the instant tax refund and the payday loan.

Timely, shocking, and powerful, it offers a much-needed look at why our country is in a financial mess and gives a voice to the millions of ordinary Americans left devastated in the wake of the economic collapse. This is the story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years.

By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness — in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience. Yunus is that rare thing: His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. In , against the advice of banking and government officials, Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with minuscule loans.

Grameen Bank, based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, now provides over 2. This book is his story and it is inspiring. But considering its impact it deserves to be this high on the list. Hugo introduces one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean — the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread.

Within his dramatic story are themes that capture the intellect and the emotions: Polak, a psychiatrist, has applied a behavioral and anthropological approach to alleviating poverty, developed by studying people in their natural surroundings. He argues that there are three mythic solutions to poverty eradication: Instead, he advocates helping the poor earn money through their own efforts of developing low-cost tools that are effective and profitable. This highly acclaimed, best-selling book takes a look at one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty?

The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance. The Galbraith incisiveness, clarity, and wit are here brought to bear on the central aspects of the most important economic and social problems of our time. They reflect, instead, the experience of the rich countries.

Or they create cause out of cure. Capital and technical expertise being available from the rich countries, shortage of these becomes the cause of poverty in the poor. Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance.

It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor—the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm.

The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. But this is the story that jolted the conscience of the nation when it first appeared in The New Yorker. His books, from the National Book Award—winning Death at an Early Age to his most recent, the critically acclaimed Shame of the Nation, are touchstones of the national conscience.

Sachs, an economist, proposes a solution to end extreme poverty in the world and explores why wealthy countries, and people, should take on this mission. Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his analysis, Sachs draws a vivid map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall.

Then, he explains why, over the past years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty. Rather than deliver a worldview to readers from on high, Sachs leads them along the learning path he himself followed, telling the remarkable stories of his own work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China, and Africa as a way to bring readers to a broad-based understanding of the array of issues countries can face and the way the issues interrelate. How does poverty impact learning, work habits and decision-making?

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This is a landmark book, but scholarly. Important to the understanding of poverty and its causes. In this gripping memoir, Tirado, author of the online essay Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts, stands before us, her bad habits swearing, smoking and bad decisions fully on display, to say that even with the best-laid plans, poverty can happen to anyone.

When red tape and a summer storm left her and her husband without a home and with nearly nothing to their names, the couple slid into the demoralizing treadmill that is poverty in America. With critical insight and fury, Tirado tears down common assumptions and superior attitudes about the working poor, from entitlement issues to finance management, and rounds it out with some hard truths about the lack of opportunities for mobility, from the inability to survive an unpaid internship to the full-body impact of commuting an hour or more every day on foot.

With a foreword by the Dalai Lama, this is a passionate call to action, presenting pages filled with over color photographs, profiles, explanatory charts and graphics that deliver an unprecedented and thought-provoking examination of global poverty, and how it impacts the poor and the rest of the world community.

Most striking, the book offers innovative ways to transform lives through individual action large or small. Grassroots organizations are profiled as potential models and at the end of each chapter A Way to Help lists nonprofit organizations that focus on problems such as child labor and lack of access to healthcare, among other issues. We are shown how change is possible. Agee and Evans spent months among the tenant-farmer families profiled in the book. In the summer of , Agee and Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South.

Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event. Today it stands as a poetic tract of its time, recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York was a pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the s.

This is the classic from just over 50 years ago that first truly explored poverty in the United States and its causes. When this book was first published, it was hailed as an explosive work and became a galvanizing force for the War on Poverty. Harrington shed light on the lives of the poor- from farm to city- and the social forces that relegated them to poverty. He was determined to make poverty in the United States visible, and his observations and analyses have had a profound effect on our country- from how we view the poor to the policies implemented to fight poverty.

In the fifty years since it was published, this book has been established as a seminal work of sociology. An eye opener then…. Also a classic movie. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into haves and have-nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. This is the Dickens novel so many readers return to most often.

About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money. Dickens can be a hard read today. His prose is not always easy to read. Even so, and for all his faults, Dickens is the greatest of English novelists and will repay careful readers with a cornucopia of insights into the human condition.

Image Source What causes poverty? So Rich, So Poor: The Price of Inequality: Stiglitz MIT America currently has the most inequality, and the least equality of opportunity, among the advanced countries. All You Can Eat: The Missing Class, by Katherine S. Payne imagesbn People in poverty face challenges virtually unknown to those in middle class or wealth—challenges from both obvious and hidden sources. A lot of people started to share it. Someone suggested that I submit it for posting on the main page of the website we hung out on. The next thing I knew, the world had turned upside down.

After the original piece went viral, I got a lot of emails from people who told me that they did not agree; they did not cope in the same ways. Keep it in mind. What was neither fair nor true was the criticism I received inferring that I was the wrong sort of poor. A lot of this criticism seemed to centre on the fact that I was not born into poverty, as though that were the only way someone might find herself unable to make rent. And yet we have a term for it: We have homeless PhDs and more than one recently middle-class person on food stamps.

Overall, though, the response was overwhelmingly one of solidarity. I got thousands of emails from people saying they understood exactly what I was trying to describe, that they felt the same way. They told me their stories — the things that bothered them and how they were dealing with life. The original piece that you just read was simply that: I am doing what I can to walk you through what it is to be poor.

To be sure, this is only one version. There are millions of us; our experiences and reactions to them are as varied as our personalities and backgrounds. This is just what life is for roughly one-third of Americans and one in five people in Great Britain. We all handle it in our own ways, but we all work in the same jobs, live in the same places, feel the same sense of never quite catching up.

It depends on the year, the job, how healthy you are. What I can say for sure is that downward mobility is like quicksand. I slid to the bottom through a mix of my own decisions and some seriously bad luck. While it can seem like upward mobility is blocked by a lead ceiling, the layer between lower-middle class and poor is horrifyingly porous from above. A lot of us live in that spongy divide. I got here in a pretty average way: I chased a career simply because it was the first opportunity available rather than because it was sensible. I also had medical bills. I had bouts of unemployment, I had a drunken driver total my car.

I had everything I owned destroyed in a flood. Poverty is a potential outcome for all of us. You cannot blame your average citizen for those things. Nor can you blame individual companies — it is how we, collectively, have decided to do things. We got here partially because of bad policy decisions and partially because of factors nobody could have foreseen. Telling an individual company to do better is like telling a poor individual to save more — true and helpful, but not so easy in practice.

They are following the market, not driving it. Besides which, any asshole with money can buy and run a company. I am not, for all my frustration, opposed to capitalism. We like the idea that anyone can succeed. What I am opposed to is the sort of capitalism that sucks the life out of a whole bunch of the citizenry and then demands that they do better with whatever they have left. Working for minimum wage means that making a long-term budget is an exercise in wishful thinking. You just have however much money you have until you run out, and you pay whatever bill is most overdue first.

We made ends meet, but barely. Not well enough to ever really feel comfortable or rest or take a day off without feeling guilty. And we were at the top of the bottom third of households that year, meaning that approximately one-third of the American population is living on the same sort of budget. Or, for some, a much smaller one.

Maybe you get sick and lose your job. Or what if, God forbid, the car breaks down or you break a bone? This is what it comes down to: There is something even worse than minimum wage. To save a buck, companies will regularly hire such workers for years. One factory I lived near used to hire a revolving number of temp workers whom they laid off after 90 days — the point at which a temp worker is supposed to get permanent job status.