[afro-nets] Poverty and Inequality - A Question of Justice

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

Poverty and Inequality - A Question of Justice
----------------------------------------------

A question of justice?

Mar 11th 2004 - From "The Economist" print edition

The toll of global poverty is a scandal. But deploring economic
"injustice" is no answer.

Available online at:
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?Story_ID=2499118



Poverty and Inequality - A Question of Justice

Press review:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,date:03-12-2004~menuPK:34461~pagePK:34392~piPK:34427~theSitePK:4607,00.html#Story4

[you might have to copy broken URL into browser]

Whenever the United Nations and its plethora of associated agen-
cies opine about the scandal of world poverty, figures on ine-
quality always pour forth, writes The Economist.

It is not bad enough, apparently, that enormous numbers of peo-
ple have to subsist on less than a dollar a day. The claim that
this makes in its own right on the compassion of the West for
its fellow men is deemed, apparently, too puny. The real scan-
dal, it seems, is that much of the world is vastly richer than
that. The implication, and often enough the explicit claim, is
that the one follows from the other: if only we in the West
weren't so rich, so greedy for resources, so driven by material
ambition-such purblind delinquent capitalists-the problem of
global poverty would be half-way to being solved.

The preoccupation bordering on obsession with economic equality
that one so often encounters at gatherings of anti-globalists,
in the corridors of aid agencies and in socialist redoubts in
backward parts of the world reflects a "lump of income" fallacy.

[Summary prepared by the External Affairs Department of the
World Bank]