How the New Poverty Agenda Neglected Social and Employment Policies in Africa

Abstract

This article argues that a shift towards issues of poverty is a welcome antidote to policy‐making that had expunged poverty from the central agenda to focus on stabilization, debt management and static allocative efficiency. Unfortunately, in correcting a narrow policy agenda the new focus pushes a good point too far when it focuses attention only on the proximate causes of poverty and narrows the development agenda. Development was aimed at more than poverty and, significantly in countries that have successfully combated poverty, the most important policy measures were not explicitly directed at poverty. Indeed in many cases, other objectives — pre‐empting social unrest, nation‐building, ‘human capital’ developmental considerations — lay behind the policies that, ex post, can be read as poverty reducing. Eradication of poverty is always embedded in social and economic development. The determinants of human development goals are multiple and cut across sectors. The new challenge in Africa is to bring back development, but now one that is democratically anchored and socially inclusive.

Key words:

• Poverty
• Employment
• Social policy

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Rolph van der Hoeven for substantial comments on an earlier draft and an anonymous referee for useful comments. The usual caveats about authorial responsibility hold.

Notes

1 SAP did, however, achieve in some cases some rather perverse forms of equalization. Available data suggest that, following SAP, the urban–rural income gap was reduced by a process of ‘equalising downward’ while intrasectoral inequality grew (Cornia, 2007, p. 53). The perverse redistribution was the consequence of a number of structural features of the adjustment model that included de‐industrialization and liberalization of labour markets, the deliberate inducements of low wage and redistributive economic policy in favour of the well‐off, and the dismantling of a number of post‐colonial social pacts. While change in the share of wages may not tell us much about overall distribution, it definitely has a clear bearing on urban inequality and poverty. We should not be led to believe that the perverse redistribution was unintended. Among some of advocates of adjustment this was good news. Sahn (1992) could argue that the collapse of sources in the urban areas was salutary since poor people do not take part in the formal economy and did not make much use of government services, and hence are less (either negatively or positively) affected by stabilization policies than non‐poor groups that used to profit much more from public services. In the event, continued rural–urban migration and the salience of the poor in African urban politics undermine both positions.

2 For the semi‐official Japanese position, Ohno (2002, p. 21) notes: ‘While most of the Japanese aid officials and experts endorse the basic principles of PRSP, including national ownership and aid partnership, they express concern about its uniformity of approach, shortage of strategic contents, and increased budgetary and human resource burden on both donors and recipients. While the advocates of PRSP readily admit the crucial linkage between economic growth and poverty reduction at the general level, they tend to focus exclusively on pro‐poor measures (e.g., education, health, environment, gender, rural infrastructure, etc.) in actual implementation. Serious discussion on the generation of economic growth is desperately lacking’.

3 In this respect, Mick Moore and Stephen Devereux have suggested some rather specific questions that we need to answer in relating national elites to the poverty question: ‘What do they think about the national causes and solutions to poverty? Which of the potential poverty do they see as meriting public attention? Which sections of the elite are most sympathetic to doing something about poverty? What instruments to they believe will be effective?’ (Moore and Devereux, 1999, p. 4).

4 In addition there is the question of accountability and representativeness of NGOS, or as Elisabeth Jelin suggests: ‘The fact is that NGOs and “private‐yet‐public” organizations do not have a built‐in mechanism of accountability. They do not have a constituency or membership composed of their “sovereign citizens”.’ They are fundamentally accountable to those who provide funds and to their own ideology and consciousness, hopefully (but only hopefully) based on ‘good values, solidarity, compassion, and commitment. Given the relative absence of institutional and societal accountability, there is always the danger of arbitrary action, of manipulation, of lack of transparency in objectives and practices’ (Jelin, 1997, p. 412).

5 A United Nations Development Programme report on China points in the same direction when it notes: ‘The poverty incidence fell most rapidly before there were specific poverty alleviation programs in existence. When these programs were flourishing, on the other hand, poverty reduction at times stagnated and even suffered reversal. This is not because China’s poverty reduction policies and programs have been useless or counter‐productive; on the contrary, there is reason to believe they have made a difference in the localities where they were carried out. Rather, it is because much larger forces have determined the shape and speed of poverty reduction, namely, macroeconomic and other general economic policies and trends. These include, inter alia, policies concerning farm prices, factor prices, state investments, fiscal structure, financial reform and the social safety net and social insurance regimes. When the constellation of such policies was strongly pro‐poor, poverty reduction occurred at a breathtaking speed, despite the absence of explicit poverty‐reduction institutions. Yet when the general policy constellation was not pro‐poor, then the course of poverty reduction was much less rapid. A key conclusion from a review of this history is that there are many ways in which China’s macroeconomic policies and economic institutional set‐up could be made more pro‐poor than they have generally been’ (Bouché et al., n.d., p. 12).

6 For example, the introduction of pension schemes by both Mauritius and Norway were made at very low levels of economic development, which goes against the World Bank arguments that such schemes are unaffordable in low‐income countries such as those in Africa.

7 On the affinity between orthodox macro‐economics and targeting, Besley and Kanbur note that it ‘is in the wake of macroeconomic and structural adjustment that targeting seems to have attained a special significance in developing countries, as more and more governments have come under pressure to reduce expenditure. Indeed, targeting has come to be seen as a panacea in poverty alleviation’ (Besley and Kanbur, 1990, p. 67).