Poor Poverty

Sundaram (Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and Chowdhury (economics, U. of Western Sydney) present nine papers originally prepared as background material for the UN publication The Poverty Challenge: Report of the World Social Situation 2009. The contributions explore the reasons for the failures of supposed poverty reduction policies and strategies around the world. Among the key themes to emerge from the papers are the fundamental limitations of mainstream perspectives on poverty and deprivation, the necessity of sustained growth in per capita output and significant job creation, the creation of slower growth rates and greater inequality as a result of the dominant thinking within the international financial institutions, the constraints on developing countries' policy and fiscal space imposed by aid conditionalities, the value of adopting pragmatic economic development policies instead of the dogmatic "market-based" solutions of neoliberalism, the greater effectiveness and political sustainability of universal social policies versus targeted practices, and the inefficacy of special programs such as microfinance or formalization of land titles without a sustained and equitable growth process. Co-published with the United Nations. Bloomsbury Academic is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)