For those of you who found my chart summarising African history since independence too complicated, my amazing friend John has (amazingly) produced a simpler version. Rather than tracking country by country, it helps you see how the governmental composition of Africa has shifted over time.

The wider a section the more states were in that situation at the time. So we can clearly see how colonialism gave way to dictatorship and war, then in many cases to one or other level of democracy. But war and tyranny remain with us today.

What crazy fun can you have with the figures? Download the spreadsheet from the original post, or try the powerpoint version. I look forward to recieving your most creative presentations of the figures!

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Following on from our recent dash through African history since independence, I thought it would be a good time to focus briefly on Ghana for a slightly more detailed look. Ghana was not only the first African country to achieve independence from colonialism, but in many way encapsulates the journey many African states have gone through since the end of the colonial period: the euphoria of independence, centred around a charismatic leader; the struggle to establish a functioning independent state, often along socialist principles; the transition of beloved leaders into unpopular tyrants; coup and military rule; and finally the hard transition to democracy.

Ghana’s 50th anniversary celebrations were criticised by some for their lavishness and expense. What is clear, though, is that while celebrating independence, African leaders are more prepared than ever to acknowledge the mistakes of the past and less likely to accuse critics of imperialism. This speech by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo at the Ghanaian celebrations is a good example.

Ghana’s independence on March 6th 1957 and Kwame Nkrumah’s steadfast commitment had by the mid 1960s heralded independence for over eighty per cent of the countries of Africa. This was a period of great expectations and exciting possibilities for the continent. Fifty years on, one cannot help but ask: where did Africa go wrong? At what point did Nkrumah’s lofty dream begin to dissipate? Until the relatively recent emergence of the more pro-active African Union (AU), all the promise of stability, security, and prosperity which political independence held for us had all but fizzled out. … It is very critical that we avert our minds to properly understanding and appreciating the mistakes of the past so that we do not condemn our collective posterity to repeating the vicious cycle that only perpetuates underdevelopment, poverty, and instability.

How did Ghana’s dreams of independence fare, and what can we learn from its experience?

Kwame Nkrumah, the activist who led Ghana to independence, had a famous saying, adapted from the Bible: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added onto you.” With independence, the hardest part of the struggle was surely over. Sadly not. Within nine years, Nkrumah was to be removed in a violent coup.

Like many African leaders, Nkrumah set the freshly independent Ghana on a path of socialism. His plan was to quickly industrialise the economy under state control. Massive infrastructure projects, notably the mammoth Akosombo Dam, were begun, with the support of the UK and US governments and the World Bank. But such projects proved ruinously expensive, and many were not completed. Although the dam was to prove highly effective, the majority of its electricity has always gone to foreign companies, as a result of the conditions Nkrumah agreed to to get it built. And its construction was financed with massive borrowing. In addition, Nkrumah placed punitive tax rates on the country’s one thriving industry, cocoa export. Ghana’s economy slid into freefall.

What’s more, Nkrumah’s rule quickly changed in character. Nkrumah had begun his regime as a popular hero, known as ‘Osagyefo’ or ‘victorious leader’ Within months, however, opposition to his regime began to develop, as is natural. In response, Nkrumah convinced parliament to pass the Preventative Detention Act, giving the government the right to imprison without trial those suspected of plots against the state. In practice, hundreds of political opponents were imprisoned. By 1964, Nkrumah managed to transform Ghana into a one-party state, and declared himself Life President. In 1966, days after the opening of his prized dam, while Nkrumah was out of the country visiting Viet Nam, the military seized power in a coup that may have been supported by the CIA, alarmed at Ghana’s drift towards the Soviet Union. Nkrumah spent the rest of his life in exile.

So began over ten years of political instability. Elections in 1969 heralded a return to civilian government, but from the beginning it struggled with massive inflation problems. Growing discontent culminated in another military coup in 1972. Military rule proved as prone to corruption and confusion as civilian rule had, and further coups followed. In 1979, Fl Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, a young Air Force officer, became leader of the military government and engineered new elections. However, after two more years of economic decline, Rawlings seized power again in 1981 - and stayed for 19 years.

Rawlings is emblematic of the “big men” who dominated African politics for decades after independence. Just 32 years old when he first took power, half-Scottish Rawlings had trained with the RAF before joining the Ghanaian air force. Like many of Africa’s longest-standing leaders, Rawlings was an accidental ruler. His initial rebellion was aimed primarily at securing better conditions for junior military officers. Once he found himself in power, he executed several senior officers before handing power over to civilians. His regime in the 1980s was marked by human rights abuses, tribal nepotism, and some suppression of dissent: what one imprisoned journalist calls “a period of sheer terror and repression”.

Rawlings didn’t share the interest of some other African leaders, like Tanzania’s famous Julius Nyere, in marxist theory. Nor was he instinctively in favour of free markets. “I don’t know any law and I don’t understand economics”, he said, “but I know it when my stomach is empty”.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Ghana’s economic policies under Rawlings veered wildly from left to right. Rawlings came to power criticising the market-friendly policies of the outgoing civilian government, which had led to high prices. The civilian government had, like many African governments of the 1980’s, initiated reform in order to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such reforms - “structural adjustment” - have been a controversial part of Western involvement in Africa over the last twenty years, just as Marxist policies had divided opinion in the 1960s and ’70s. Rawlings came to power criticising “Western Imperialism” as represented by the IMF, and expressing enthusiasm for Cuba’s Fidel Castro, as many socialist leaders in Africa had done before. Within two years, however, Ghana’s crises of health and education services, agricultural productivity, and collapsing basic infrastructure forced Rawlings to change course, and the country went back to the IMF, prepared to reform.

Ghana’s market reforms were as typical of African economic policies in the 1980s as its previous socialist regime had been of that period. The currency was gradually devalued, large numbers of public servants made redundant, and state business privatised. We’ll talk later on about the theory behind these reforms.

Just as Ghana had been seen as a model colony under British rule, and had inspired all of Africa with its independence, so it now became the model for IMF-led structural adjustment. Like in many African economies, market reforms proved effective at increasing economic growth, to a respectable 6%. But equally typically, the benefits didn’t seem to accrue to those at the bottom of the pile, and poverty remained stubbornly high. And Ghana’s debt spiralled, leaving the government burdened by payments and policy more and more ceded to the IMF’s economists.

Once again like many African dictators, Rawlings was forced by public pressure to introduce democratic reforms in the early 1990s. Elected in 1992 and 1996 in elections condemned by opposition parties as rigged, he then retired in 2000 after two terms as president. His chosen successor was defeated in 2000 by the current president, John Kufuor. The transition was the first peaceful handover of power in Ghana’s history.

Like his predecessors, Kufuor is a classic example of the African leader of his age. Unlike little-educated military men like Rawlings, he studied at Oxford. In contrast to Rawlings’ military background, Kufuor he served as a Member of Parliament in democratic periods and as Secretary for Local Government in the first few months of Rawlings’ second regime. Following a falling-out with Rawlings, though, he focussed on business, and was as lauded on his election for his business connections and economic instincts as his democratic political experience. And while “big men” like Rawlings tend to be highly charismatic, Kufuor is low-key and a little bland, preferring consensus-building to stirring rhetoric. He’s representative of a new, educated, business-savvy generation of African leaders that is supposedly transforming the continent’s fortunes.

Under Kufuor, Ghana has taken steps to remedy its economic malaise that are, true to form, representative of those taken by many poor countries. It entered the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), better known to most of us as “debt relief”. In exchange for commitments on democracy, human rights, and anti-corruption efforts, Ghana has seen its debt burden reduced by $3.5 billion. But like in other countries working closely with the IMF and World Bank, related reforms like water privatisation have proven highly controversial. Kufuor has also embraced the new wave of African governance reform: he was the first African leader to submit his government to the New Partnership For Africa’s Development (NEPAD)’s Peer Review Mechanism, a system for collaborative transparency between African leaders, and has recently begun a term as Chair of the African Union.

Now, Ghana faces an equally emblematic set of challenges. Progress is being made on poverty, and the country is on course to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty (the proportion of people earning less than a dollar a day) by 2015. But over a third of the country is still poor. Still heavily dependent on exports of cocoa and gold, the country faces the challenge of diversifying its economy to protect itself from price fluctuations. And even as the country seeks to increase economic growth, it faces increasing concern about the effects of growth the local environment.

It’s too easy to oversimplify Africa’s problems, when its 54 states all face unique challenges. But many aspects of Ghana’s story in the fifty years since independence are archetypal: a turbulent transition through socialism and military rule, structural adjustment and debt, towards democratisation and diversification. But more importantly, the debates that Ghana’s experience touches off - on the benefits and costs of aid and debt; the effectiveness and side-effects of market-reform policies; and the extent to which we should have faith in the new generation of African leaders - are some of the crucial debates we’ll be continuing to look at over the next few months. For now, though, let’s raise a glass to the 50th anniversary of Ghana - and of the start of the strange, sad, but unfinished tale of modern Africa.

We have no illusions about the size of the problems that we face. How can we, when there are daily stories of young Africans undertaking perilous journeys across the Sahara desert, sometimes on foot and in flimsy boats on raging oceans in a bid to get to Europe and elsewhere? How can we when old and new diseases like Malaria and HIV/AIDS still plague Africa and reap a grim harvest on the youth?

But there is no doubt that Africa and many of its nations are making progress… even as we celebrate, we must not become complacent but keep on striving towards achieving excellence. Our destiny is with the most advanced in the human community, and we must pursue it.”

- John Kufuor, Accra, 03/03/2007

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Even I’m not sufficiently presumptuous to try to summarise fifty years of a continent’s history in a blog post. But I can provide a sort of reference guide, for quickly knowing a country’s basic political history. The file below doesn’t tell you any detail about famine, coup attempts, economic growth and stagnation, or tribal rivalry. But it does tell you who was colonised, under a dictator, democratic, or involved in a major war when. A host of minor transitional governments, etc. are ignored, as are some minor conflicts. And occasionally how to categorise a government has been a judgment call. Comment below if you think anything needs revising. But it’s still a useful overview of the broad narrative of Africa’s years of independence.

A History of African Independence in Ten Minutes

So what can we learn from a quick skim of the sheet?

• Independence and democracy were never the same. As country after country celebrated independence in the 1950’s and 60’s, almost all promised a government for and of the people. Almost without exception, however, the independence leaders - some former elected politicians, some military leaders, some hand-picked by the former colonial power - quickly descended into dictatorship, often with a socialist program. Two decades of tyranny and economic stagnation began.
• Since the end of the cold war, Democracy is on the march. Scroll along to the early 1990’s and skim down the sheet. There’s a lot of green, right? The end of the cold war in 1990-1 brought an uptick in public and international pressure on dictatorial governments in Africa. And the American, British and Russian governments, who had propped up various tyrants for strategic reasons, suddenly withdrew support. The result, throughout the 1990’s, is a succession of dictatorships, from Ethiopia to Tanzania, an explosions of elections.
• …but it has a long way to go. There’s a lot of dark green amongst the light - meaning many “elected” governments are truly no more democratic than the military rulers they replaced. What’s more, the downfall of old leaders has in many cases, from Congo to Burundi, blown the lid off old ethnic and tribal tensions, prompting a new wave of civil wars across the continent. So although groups such as the African Commission are right to point out that democracy is taking root again in Africa, it’s important not to get too relaxed. And my coding is concerned only with elections. You score a light-green ranking if you’re elected in free and fair multiparty elections, and more African countries meet that standard now than ever before. But on other other measures, like freedom of the press, the picture is more bleak. The think-tank Freedom House labels only a handful of African states as truly “free.”
  1. Known as The Fate Of Africa in the US.

This main narrative - of independence collapsing quickly into tyranny, before democracy shakily took hold in the 1990’s - is important to keep in mind as we go on to discuss the history of aid, debt, and so on.

Have a look through.Maybe stick it on your wall. And for God’s sake, tell me if you think I’ve got anything wrong.

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First off, draw a little map of Africa. You can probably do that. Big bulge to the left, spikey bit to the right, spikey bit to the bottom. Now, draw a line where you think the equator is. No cheating!

Done it? I bet good money you’ve drawn it too far North. In fact, the equator runs right through the middle, under the spike to the east (also known as the Horn of Africa, or the Somali Peninsula), and the bulge to the west (also known as, um, West Africa). If you’ve got Google Earth, press ctrl+L and you’ll see a latitude & longitude grid, neatly illustrating this. If not, try this map.

Why the hell does this matter? Well, for one thing it’s interesting to see just how Northern our world’s main landmasses are. But for another, it matters because it means Africa is primarily a tropical continent. Those dark jungles you used to read about in Tintin in the Congo are really there, to this day (nowadays, though, they’re not called jungles, but the less evocative tag Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests).

Now, think of an image of starving Africans. Go on, there are so many to choose from! What do you see? Parched, cracked soil? Failing crops? Brown huts, brown soil and brown, starving people, baking under a harsh, unrelenting sun? Yep. In other words, you see desert. Our images of African poverty are still defined by the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5, broadcast all over Britain by Michael Burke and Band Aid, all over the US by USA for Africa, and all over pretty much everywhere by Live Aid.

Well, brace yourself: those images don’t even begin to show the real problems. Northern Africa has its troubles, Ethiopia still has severe malnutrition problems (that’s development-speak for “people are still starving to death there”), and you probably have a clue about what’s going on in Sudan. But the real nasty stuff happens in an area called Sub-Saharan Africa. You’ve probably heard politicians mention it. I think I thought it meant the Sahara, as if “sub” gained some odd extra meaning. But no, it means “below,” and sub-Saharan Africa is that large, green bit below the desert. (If you’re one of those who, quite reasonably, objects to the meaningless use of “up” and “down,” “sub” and “super” to mean north and south, the alternative term is Tropical Africa.)

Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest area in the world. The map here gives you an idea of its status in the African economy.

So why such crushing poverty here, on such fertile land? Malnutrition happens where not enough food is grown, right? Well, no. I’ll have to save the detailed explanation for another day - I haven’t even begun to understand it myself yet - but suffice to say, it’s increasingly accepted that feeding people isn’t about how much food you can grow, it’s about trading, transport and power relations. Those dense jungles don’t make moving goods around any easier. To use a nice example from the Africa Commission’s report, it costs only $1500 to ship a car from Japan to Abidjan on the south coast of Cote D’Ivoire, but $5000 to get it across Africa to Addis Ababa.

And if the idea of starving desert villages is still etched in your mind, consider one more fact. Twenty years from now, the majority of Africans will live in cities.

Revise your African geography

Tags: Africa, geography, development, poverty,

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I’m going to have to look into this in some detail, I think. But I want to understand debt and aid first, because I think they may be simpler. More generally, I’m conscious that I keep talking about the ‘Make Poverty History proposals’ and the ‘G8 proposals’ as if they were one and the same. But of course, they’re not, and neither are they the only proposals put forward in 2005.

There are a collection of studies and reports, all published in 2005, all of which come to broadly similar recommendations. All call for around a doubling of aid; cancellation of debt for most poor African countries; and some reductions in key rich-world agricultural subsidies. The reports are:

• The Make Poverty History manifesto
• The report of the Africa Commission, the think tank of leading African brains (and Bob Geldof) set up by Tony Blair to lead the debate;
• The Final report of the UN Millennium Development Commission, the body set up to monitor and direct progress towards the Millennium Development Goals; and
• Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty. Sachs was the primary author of the UN report, and though this was not the only book on the topic published in 2005 by any means, it was by far the most high-profile (and the only one, as far as I know, Madonna has read).

So I think if I’m to find a way into this mass of division and disagreement, it must be to take these reports as a starting point. To understand more fully what they propose, and why they say it will work, and how they differ. Then it’ll be time to look at the criticisms of them, from both the right and the left*. You’ll be able to find my posts describing these reports under the category The Main Proposals.

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Any serious conversation about the nature and causes of poverty in Africa, and its reduction, must begin with an attempt to measure the scale of the problem. The Make Poverty History campaign, and the huge wave of debate, campaigning and publicity on the topic that seemed to take over the world in mid-2005, made repeated recourse to the more scary-sounding statistics on poverty, most notably that “more than one billion people around the world live on less than one dollar a day.” But once you start to delve a little deeper into the argument, it becomes obvious counting the poor is a lot harder than it seems.

This matters, because measures of the number of poor - and how it’s changed over time - are crucial to the debate over the best course of action. Take the long-running dispute between the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf and political economist Robert Wade. Wolf started the barney by asserting that the number of people living in extreme poverty had declined by 200 million since 1980, the period associated with privatisation and globalisation in developing countries, and therefore these policies must be good for poverty reduction. Wolf’s evidence for the figures was a World Bank study. Sounds pretty tight. But Wade retorts that the World Bank’s estimate is flawed. In fact, look behind almost any disagreement on the way forward for poverty reduction, and you’ll find a disagreement over figures.

If we can’t even agree on how many poor people there are, how are we ever to plan for poverty reduction? What does “extreme poverty” mean, anyway? Who are “the poor?”

Defining poverty

The measure most commonly used is the aforementioned - people living on less than a dollar a day. In fact, this common phrase is a complete misstatement. First, it’s not one dollar at all, but $1.08. That may not sound like much, but that 8 cents can vary estimates of poverty enormously. Second, it’s not dollars in today’s money. It’s actually Purchasing Power Parity 1993 Dollars. In other words, it’s the money required in any given country, in 1993, to buy an amount of goods that you could buy for a dollar in the US. It’s then adjusted to make for today’s prices. So “living on less than a dollar a day” really means, “living on less money per day than it would take to buy what you can buy for a dollar in the US.”

Realising this makes a huge difference to your perception of the $1/day figure. In no sensible world could $1 a day be seen as a decent income. But if you imagine an African country with a heavily devalued currency, $1 might sound like enough to buy, say, a few loaves of bread, as opposed to just one.

Although there are objections to the PPP dollar measure, it’s generally accepted as a reasonable attempt to compare countries. But the actual details of the PPP measurement are controversial. The standard “basket of services” that was used in 1993 to assess PPP dollars - i.e. what the value of a dollar in goods terms was - included not just essentials such as food, clothes and shelter, but advanced services too - like massages. This wouldn’t matter, except that the relative cost of essentials and luxuries is very different in different countries. In the US, a 30-minute massage costs a lot more than a bag of grain. In many African countries, the opposite is true. So a measure including such services in the “basket” has the effect of over-estimating the ability of the poor in Africa to buy essentials (see Wade, p3-11).

So why don’t we just use a new basket? The problem is, when you change the measure, you move the goalposts and make comparison with the old system impossible. This has already happened once, with the PPP assessment based on 1993 figures, that generated the $1.08 poverty line. Before that, a different measure of PPP was used, that had generated the original poverty line of $1. That was based on measurements taken in 1985. One of Wade’s key criticisms of the World Bank study Wolf quotes is that it tries to compare figures taken with the 1985 PPP measure with figures taken with the 1993 measure. The problem could be solved if the World Bank went back and calculated the figures before 1993 with the new measure, but for some reason, it hasn’t. To prevent any further problems like this, most development economists say we’ll have to stick with the measure we use now, but be more aware of its limitations.

The PPP dispute is just one of the massive number of disagreements over all our methods of measuring poverty. Here are some more:

Number of poor vs. proportion of population who are poor

Even if the number of poor people in the world has gone up over the past two decades, so has the world’s population - by a lot. So it’s still quite possible the proportion of the world’s people who are poor has still gone down. Does this matter? In fact, this dispute is central to the wide range of opinions on whether things are getting better or worse. Most studies suggest that the proportion of people in the world who are poor - “poverty incidence” - has gone down. But the number of poor may have gone up, and it’s that that campaigners tend to focus on (Wade, p3).

Poverty vs inequality

Here again there’s disagreement both about what’s happening, and about whether it matters. Many studies suggest that overall, inequality between countries has gone down over the last 25 years. These studies, horribly complex things, usually use something called the “Gini coefficient,” a standard measure of inequality in any set of figures.

However, others counter with two caveats. First, while overall inequality may have decreased, polarisation - the gap between the two extremes - has almost certainly increased (Wade, p14). This is the meaning behind statements like:

While the share of the world’s resources in the hands of the top ten percent people has increased, the share held by the bottom ten percent has decreased.

Second, critics argue, while inequality between countries may have decreased, inequality within countries appears to have increased. So for example the gap between the US and China has got much, much smaller, but the gap between the poorest and richest Chinese has got much, much bigger. Any attempt to measure the actual inequality of all the individuals in the world requires a mixture of the two measures, and such measures are decidedly ambiguous about how the last twenty years have gone (Dowrick & Akmal).

What’s more, there’s also the question: does it matter? What should concern us is how many people are poor, unable to reasonably feed, clothe and educate their families, protect themselves against disease, and so on. Increasing inequality could just mean the rich have got richer. As long as the poor have got richer as well, where’s the problem?

Of course, this is an argument that goes well beyond development theory. Domestic politics in every western country features disputes over whether inequality matters - as Tony Blair rather craply put it, “why is it a problem if David Beckham makes more money?”

But critics argue that it’s particularly relevant to the development debate. First, almost all domestic political systems assume that inequality does matter, but the same ideas haven’t been applied to development. The poverty line in any western country is defined as a share of average income, but the standard measures of poverty in developing countries are all based on actual, not relative, wealth.

Secondly, the dangers of inequality may be larger internationally. Domestically, problems widely believed to be linked to inequality include crime and civil disorder. Internationally, the argument goes, the risks include terrorism, war, and massively increased migration to the developed world, legal and otherwise.

Household Surveys vs National Accounts

Both poverty and inequality measures require knowledge of consumption rates, that is, some measure of how much money people actually have to spend. This is carried out through household surveys, involving having households record their income and outgoings for a period of time. These surveys are vital to the PPP poverty measurements.

There are various problems with household surveys, but the most serious is the duration of recall, i.e. how long you ask people to record. Asking people to record seven days tends to lead to higher estimates of income than asking them to record 30 days. One study revealed that if you used a seven-day recall in India, the number of people classed as poor would halve! (Wade, p7)

However household surveys tend to give higher measures of poverty than governmental accounts. This matters, because many measures of world inequality use accounts instead of household surveys for their figures (household surveys are only used to study income distribution in a country, not overall income itself). The few studies that use income estimates derived solely from household surveys report higher poverty and inequality, and worsening trends in both (Wade, p15, quoting Branko Milanovic).

Pesky success stories: China and India

Above I said, “Many studies suggest that overall, inequality between countries has gone down over the last 25 years.” There’s one other, dirty great caveat on that which needs to be outlined. In the last 25 years China and India have grown tremendously, and together, they account for over 30% of the world’s population. This has a massive effect on the figures: so much so that, while measurements of inequality which weight each country by population show reductions in inequality, measurements that give each country equal weight don’t (Wade p14).

So what? They’re real countries, aren’t they? The problems are twofold. First, in simple statistical terms, such large figures overshadow the story in other areas. So we can’t learn anything useful about Africa from global figures so skewed by the world’s two largest countries. Second, China and India are very particular types of LDC, with particular needs and challenges. There’s a risk of policy conclusions being drawn from their success and applied elsewhere where it isn’t appropriate.

So what if you take China and India out of the figures? The results are then pretty unclear, with no clear trend either upward or downward in either inequality or poverty.

Poverty: about more than money?

So far, we’ve talked about poverty purely in terms of income. Well, obviously, you might think. Poverty means no money, doesn’t it? Actually, the whole idea of measuring the poor by income has come under heavy fire under recent years from theorists such as Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen, who argue that a range of other factors either affect whether people are poor, or can be used as better measures of poverty than income (OUP, p35-42).

The other elements of this “multi-dimensional” model of poverty are:

1. Participation. Also known as “voice,” this means access to decision-making, influence over politics, and influence in the community.
2. Empowerment. Related to but not the same as participation, this is about people’s control over their own lives. So, for example, a women’s group that gives women a chance to find out about the reasons for recent declines in their income, and tells them about their options, is empowering because it increases their control over their situation.
3. Vulnerability to shocks. Even someone whose income is enough to keep them at a reasonable level of comfort could face disaster in the event of a price crash, failed crop, or illness. Measures which help people plan for such events - from government-run social security, to private insurance, to tinned food - have the effect of improving people’s security, even though they don’t affect income measurements.

These factors are notoriously hard to quantify, but are hugely important to planning poverty policies. Another set of factors are seen as useful indicators, alongside income, of poverty:

1. Life expectancy
2. Literacy
3. Education enrolment

Amongst a few others (including an income-based measurement of poverty), these are included in the UN’s Human Development Index. In addition, there’s the Human Poverty Index, which is weighted more towards poverty.

Multi-dimensional measurements of poverty are hard to compare and work with, and economists mostly hate them. But they’re an important part of the case for the general state of poverty having got worse in the last 20 years. AIDS, for example, has slashed life expectancies across Africa, which only indirectly affects income measures but would be seen by many as part and parcel of the African poverty problem.

Finally, it’s pointed out that income-based measures ignore the sources of food and other essentials that come from outside the market. Food is grown, foraged, and bartered, and these activities are hard to measure.

The need for common measures

The range of measures available is undoubtedly a positive thing - it makes us more aware of the problems of those measures that are used most frequently. Indeed, given that the only comprehensive poverty studies regularly done are by the World Bank, and there’s some evidence of the World Bank selecting its measures in line with political factors, more, rather than fewer, studies are needed. But there’s also a risk of multiple measures - that all the players in a debate are using those that support their opinion. How many times have you seen one newspaper columnist declaring that things are just getting worse for the world’s poor, and another declaring things are just getting better? For a meaningful debate, we need some agreement on measures.

You can’t blame the likes of Make Poverty History for using catchy, if potentially misleading, figures such as “more than a billion on less than $1/day” (incidentally, the actual World Bank figure is 1.2bn; but the problems listed above mean the figure is almost certainly higher). They’ve got a point to make. But the media should know better. If a fraction of the analytical rigour that goes into the reporting of business-friendly economic statistics, such as interest and inflation rates, went into the presentation of development data, the conversation would be much, much richer. For my part, I’m determined - on this site and in the documentary - to be clear about the methodology and sources of figures cited.

This much we know

Realising the extent to which even the basic measures of poverty are controversial, it would be easy to throw hands up in the air and give up. And of course, attempting to study the relationship between poverty and other factors, such as globalisation, throws up even more problems. Fortunately, there are a few things which we can draw out with certainty.

1. China and India are growing really, really fast
2. Other LDCs, particularly Africa and Latin America, are growing significantly slower than MDCs
3. Too many people are poor

Whether you see poverty and inequality as having worsened or improved over the last 25 years, and however you draw the measure of the numbers living in extreme poverty now, no-one is suggesting things are good enough. Given the generally extremely positive economic progress of MDCs in the last 15 or so years, there’s simply no moral justification for the continued existence of extreme poverty - or rather, there’s no excuse for poverty reduction not to be top of the political agenda.

Useful Sources

“Globalization, Poverty And Income Distribution: Does The Liberal Argument Hold?” Robert Wade

Introduction to Poverty and Inequality Open University 2002

“Explaining contradictory trends in global income inequality: a tale of two biasses” Steve Dowrick and Muhammad Akmal

“The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It” Branko Milanovic

“Why are the Critics so Convinced that Globalization is Bad for the Poor?” Emma Aisbett

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