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Original Articles

On the causes of increasing world poverty and inequality, or why the Matthew effect prevails

Pages 163-188 | Published online: 23 Jan 2007
 

Notes

Robert Hunter Wade, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.

The first wave was 1870–1914; the second, 1945–80; the third, 1980 to the present. See World Bank, Globalisation, Growth, and Poverty: Building an Inclusive World Economy (World Bank/Oxford University Press, 2002).

James Wolfensohn, ‘Foreword’, World Development Indicators 2002 (World Bank, 2002).

World Bank, Globalisation, Growth and Poverty, p. 50.

Robert Hunter Wade, ‘Is Globalisation Reducing Poverty and Inequality?’, World Development, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2004).

John Hicks, Value and Capital (Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 84–5, 88–9. Hicks continued: ‘We must be aware, however, that we are taking a dangerous step, and probably limiting to a serious extent the problems with which our subsequent analysis will be fitted to deal. Personally, however, I doubt if most of the problems we shall have to exclude for this reason are capable of much useful analysis by the methods of economic theory.’ I thank David Ellerman and Philip Toner for the Hicks reference. See also Erik Reinert, ‘Globalisation in the periphery as a Morgenthau Plan: the underdevelopment of Mongolia in the 1990s’, in: Erik Reinert (ed.), Globalisation, Economic Development and Inequality: An Alternative Perspective (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2004); and Philip Toner, Main Currents in Cumulative Causation: The Dynamics of Growth and Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).

They include: Steve Dowrick and Muhammad Akmal, ‘Explaining contradictory trends in global income inequality: a tale of two biases’, Faculty of Economics and Commerce, Australia National University, (2001), available at: http://ecocomm.anu.edu.au/people/info.asp?Surname|2negru||2negru||negru|=|2negru||2negru||negru|Dowrick&Firstname‐Steve; Branko Milanovic, ‘True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculations Based on Household Surveys Alone’, Economic Journal, Vol. 112, No. 476 (2002), pp. 51–9; Branko Milanovic, Can We Discern the Effect of Globalisation on Income Distribution? Evidence from Household Budget Surveys, World Bank Policy Research Working Papers, No. 2876, 2002; and Yuri Dikhanov & Michael Ward, ‘Evolution of the global distribution of income in 1970–99’, Proceedings of the Global Poverty Workshop (2003), Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, available at http://www‐1.gsb. Columbia.edu/ipd/povertywk.html.

Salvatore Babones, ‘The structure of the world‐economy, 1960–1999’, paper presented at 97th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, 2002.

World Bank, Globalisation, Growth, and Poverty. For more examples of this kind of analysis, see Francois Bourguignon et al., Making Sense of Globalisation: A Guide to the Economic Issues (Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2002).

World Bank, Globalisation, Growth and Poverty, p. 51.

Ibid., p. 36. Emphasis added.

Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble (Verso, 1999).

It would be worth comparing the World Bank's set of ‘globaliser’ countries with Babone's set of seven countries out of 100 that went stably up one zone between 1960 and 1999. Do all of Babone's seven fall within the Bank's ‘globalisers’?

Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver & Benjamin Brewer, ‘Industrial Convergence, Globalisation and the Persistence of the North–South Divide’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2003), pp. 3–31.

Gary Gereffi & Miguel Korzeniewicz (eds), Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Praeger, 1994).

I draw on John Sutton, ‘Rich Trades, Scarce Capabilities: Industrial Development Revisited’, Keynes Lecture, British Academy, October 2000. See also Ralph Gomory & William Baumol, Toward a Theory of Industrial Policy‐Retainable Industries, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University, RR 92–54, December 1992; Michael Porter, ‘Clusters and the New Economics of Competition’, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 76, No. 6 (1998), pp. 77–90; Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman & Anthony Venables, The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (MIT Press, 1999); and Anthony Venables, ‘Trade, geography and monopolistic competition: theory and an application to spatial inequalities in developing countries’, in: Richard Arnott, Bruce Greenwald, Ravi Kanbur & Barry Nalebuff (eds), Economics for an Imperfect World: Essays in Honour of Joe Stiglitz (MIT Press, 2003), pp. 501–18.

Robert Lucas, ‘On the Mechanics of Economic Development’, Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 22 (1988), pp. 3–42.

I sat next to an Indian woman on a plane from London to Boston, who asked me whether she had to declare to Customs a 20 kilo bag of rice. I asked her why she was bringing such a large amount. She explained that she came from a village near Chennai (Madras), she worked as a programmer for a local software company, one day she received a letter from a Massachusetts software company offering her a job. She had never been to Delhi or Mumbai before, let alone America. She was bringing the rice as a subsistence cache while exploring for safe foods in America.

Robert Wade, ‘What Strategies are Viable for Developing Countries Today? The WTO and the Shrinking of Development Space’, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2003), pp. 621–44.

For example, Gary Gereffi, ‘International Trade and Industrial Upgrading in the Apparel Commodity Chain’, Journal of International Economics, Vol. 48, No 1 (1999), pp. 37–70.

Andrew Schrank, ‘Ready‐to‐wear development? Foreign investment, technology transfer, and learning‐by‐watching in the apparel trade’, mimeo, Department of Sociology, Yale University, November 2002.

Alan Tonelson, ‘There’s only so much that foreign trade can do', Washington Post, 2 June 2002.

See UNCTAD, ‘China’s accession to the WTO: managing integration and industrialization', in: Trade and Development Report 2002: Developing Countries in World Trade (UNCTAD, 2002), ch. 5.

ECLA, Globalisation and Development (ECLA, 2002), Box 2.1, p. 38.

Michael Gestrin, Rory Knight & Alan M. Rugman, The Templeton Global Performance Index, Templeton College, University of Oxford, 1999, 2000 and 2001, available at http://www.templeton.ox.ac.uk.

Paul Krugman, ‘For richer’, New York Times, 20 October 2002.

The financial sector is also among the biggest sources of political finance in the USA. On financialisation, see Robert Wade, ‘The US role in the long Asian crisis of 1990–2000’, in: Arvid Lukauskas & Francisco Rivera‐Batiz, The Political Economy of the East Asian Crisis and its Aftermath (Edward Elgar, 2001), pp. 195–226; and Ronald Dore, Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism—Japan and Germany vs. the Anglo‐Saxons (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Frank Partnoy, F.I.A.S.C.O: Blood in the Water on Wall Street (Norton, 1997).

World Bank, Averting the Old‐Age Crisis, Policy Research Report, Washington DC, 1994; and R. Holzmann & Joseph Stiglitz (eds), New Ideas about Old Age Security (World Bank, 2001).

Alice H. Amsden, Ted Tschang & Akira Goto, A New Classification of R&D Characteristics for International Comparison (With a Singapore Case Study), Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo, December 2001.

UNCTAD, Trade and Development Report, p. 167.

Richard Lapper, ‘China begins to exert its influence on Latin America’, Financial Times, 26 September 2003.

Gowan, The Global Gamble.

Also in services. See Out of Service: The Development Dangers of the General Agreement on Trade in Services, World Development Movement, London, March 2002; and Wade, ‘What Strategies are Viable for Developing Countries Today?’.

‘WTO’s yard a mess: developing countries need to embrace trade reforms, too', Financial Times, 8 August 2003. Emphasis added.

Reinert, ‘Globalisation in the periphery’.

Joshua Cooper Ramo, ‘The three marketers’, Time, 15 February 1999.

National Security Affairs Presidential Assistant Anthony Lake, speech of 21 September, 1993. Emphasis added.

Timothy Besley & Robin Burgess, ‘Halving World Poverty’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2003), pp. 3–22.

Matthew Lee & William Bankston, ‘Political Structure, Economic Inequality, and Homicide: A Cross‐ Sectional Analysis’, Deviant Behaviour: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1999), pp. 27–55; Ching Chi Hsieh & Mark Pugh, ‘Poverty, Income Inequality, and Violent Crime: A Meta‐Analysis of Recent Aggregate Data Studies’, Criminal Justice Review, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1993), pp. 182–202; Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman & Norman Loayza, ‘What causes violent crime?’, The World Bank, Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, processed 1998; and Richard Freeman, ‘Why Do so Many Young American Men Commit Crimes and What Might We Do About It?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1996), pp. 25–42.

Paul Demeny, ‘Population Policy Dilemmas in Europe at the Dawn of the Twenty‐First Century’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2003), pp. 1–28.

Wade, ‘Creating capitalisms’, introduction to new printing of Governing the Market (Princeton University Press, 2003).

See Jean Imbs & Romain Wacziarg, ‘Stages of Diversification’, American Economic Review, Vol. 93, No. 1 (2003), pp. 63–86. There are interesting analytical questions about how to integrate the advantages of diversification (economic activity spreading more equally across sectors as per capita income rises, in one country) with the advantages of a rising ratio of increasing to decreasing return activities; and interesting policy questions about how and when to accelerate diversification with infant industry promotion policies.

Wade, Governing the Market. See also Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (Random House, 1984); Sanjaya Lall, Competitiveness, Technology and Skills (Edward Elgar, 2001); Ha‐Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (Anthem, 2002); and Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Polity, 1998).

Wade, ‘What Strategies are Viable for Developing Countries Today?’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Hunter Wade Footnote

Robert Hunter Wade, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.

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