Oxford University economist Professor Paul Collier’s book about poverty has won the prestigious Lionel Gelber Prize for 2008. The book’s title explains its subject rather well: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It According to the description, the book investigates and attempts to explain why traditional […]
Category Archives: Aid Reform
Food and Energy Costs Worsen Poverty Problem
UN officials named the biggest challenges to meeting poverty reduction goals as the rising prices of food and energy as well as global warming. The demand for oil will continue to increase as countries all over the world continue to industrialize and develop. Of course, we continue to use up more and more of our […]
Poverty Priorities
I often stress the importance of education and raising children in the fight against poverty. Education empowers people, and people empowered with education will have the skills to take care of themselves, to take care of their families, and to help uplift society as a whole. We do need to find large-scale ways to provide […]
Defining Poverty
I think those of us who work for poverty alleviation would benefit from trying harder to define poverty. Common misconceptions about poverty hinder the social movement to eradicate poverty. I think we can often trace the misconceptions to a misunderstanding of what the word poverty means in the socioeconomic context. I think finding a accurate […]
Bill Gates Suggests Creative Capitalism To Alleviate Poverty
At the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates said that we need to revise capitalism so that it also serves poor people, which he calls creative capitalism. I usually avoid suggesting “capitalism” as a way to alleviate poverty, because so many people have such different interpretations of what the word means, and because “capitalism” usually seems […]
Trading Away Poverty
In a New York Times letter-to-the-editor entitled Trading Away Poverty, Ignacio Sosa writes that free markets and trade can do more to fight poverty than donations to large organizations such as the World Bank. I agree completely. Of course, we can both trade with and donate to poor communities. The two methods do not exclude […]