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ABSTRACT
This paper assesses headway made by governments in Brazil, India, China and South Africa in pursuing three goals: reducing income poverty; reaching the poorest of the poor and reducing inequality. Outcomes vary as we move up the ladder from the first and easiest of these challenges to the third and most daunting. Then the definition of poverty is broadened to include severe shortage of opportunities, liberties and capabilities. The paper discusses how the four countries performed in ameliorating several human development indicators and in enhancing poor people’s ‘political capacity’, the lack of which is an important dimension of their poverty.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 This is based on the recently revised World Bank's poverty line at 1.90 USD/day at 2011 purchasing power parity.
2 The first MDG was to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.
3 Authors’ calculation based on data taken from the World Development Indicators (WDI).
4 This is not the place to discuss the limitations of this rather crude way of measuring income poverty. Suffice it to say that, for example, India has recently decided to provide highly subsidised food through the National Food Security Act (2013) to 67% of the population, thus implicitly recognising the inadequacy of a poverty line that identifies only 21% of its population as poor. See Ravallion (Citation2016, ch. 4) for a review of the debates around the poverty line(s).
5 As per the new international poverty line at 1.90$/day.
6 Authors’ calculation on the basis of the data taken from IMF (Citation2015).
7 The World Bank's ASPIRE database has data for a single year for the four countries; but the dataset's reliability is questionable. For example, the figure for India for total social expenditure is 0.7% of GDP in 2014. However, three programmes alone (the MGNREGA, the Midday Meal Scheme and the Integrated Child Development Services) account for more than that amount. The ILO's SECSOC database does not include data for India and includes health expenditure in South Africa and pension expenditure in Brazil (which is a highly regressive form of social security in Brazil, as it benefits the better offs). IFPRI's SPEED figures are highly questionable too (see also Barrientos, Citation2013, p. 168 and ff. for a discussion of these issues).
8 Interview by James Manor with an informant in Durban, 26 February 1998.
9 The Hukou system formally identifies a person as a resident of an area. That person will be allowed to access public services only in the area where he/she resides.
10 The Hindu, 30 March and 5 April 2014.
11 It had an especially strong impact on poor village women – who, in many parts of India, seldom left their houses before the MGNREGA. They performed a substantial proportion of the work under that programme – many millions of person-days – which drew them into the public sphere where they developed ties to other poor women. It also paid them wages in their own names which often gave them a degree of material autonomy within their households. One team of field researchers found that domestic violence had decreased after women had worked under the MGNREGA. These issues are discussed in much greater detail in Jenkins and Manor (Citation2017).
12 These comments are based on interviews by James Manor with two Indian officials who took part in the talks, New Delhi, 7 August 2012.
13 This paragraph draws on James Manor's discussions of the workings of the MGNREGA with South African officials as they developed their plans for a rural employment programme.