Poverty reduction

Poverty reduction, or poverty alleviation, is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty.

Quotes

A sound anti-poverty strategy should not only aim to increase incomes, but also provide the poor with a variety of assets — personal, social, political and environmental to help them overcome human poverty.
- Raja Chelliah and R. Sudarshan. Income-poverty and Beyond: Human Development in India. Anthem Press. 1999. p. 193. ISBN 978-1-84331-001-3.

If farmers become weak the country loses self-reliance but if they are strong, freedom also becomes strong. If we do not maintain our progress in agriculture, poverty cannot be eliminated from India. But our biggest poverty alleviation programme is to improve the living standard of our farmers. The thrust of our poverty alleviation programmes is on the uplift of the farmers.
- Rajiv Gandhi, Inagural Speech at the 25th National Convention of the Bharat Krishak Samaj, Hyderabad, 15 February 1988. Transcript at Selected Speeches and Writings: 1 January 1988-31 December 1988. Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. 1989. p. 180. . Quoted in Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi. Concept Publishing Company. 2009. p. 25. ISBN 978-81-8069-587-2.

For the communist countries in the periphery, the goal was not only to mobilize resources for industrialization, but to organize production around public services and human needs in ways that were neglected or even impossible under capitalism. Empirical studies demonstrate that they achieved better social outcomes than their capitalist counterparts at any given level of national production, including higher life expectancy, better education attainment, and lower child mortality. They also delivered strong progress against extreme poverty: by the 1980s, the prevalence of basic-needs poverty was near zero in both China and Russia. As the economist Amartya Sen remarked in his 1981 study of health and literacy achievements around the world: "One thought that is bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty removal."
- Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, "Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism." Monthly Review (July 1, 2023)

It is almost enough to make one's jaw drop to think that officials at the World Bank and the IMF would suggest that they have poverty alleviation in mind when they force governments to withdraw subsidies that enable poor people to get clean water to drink. If this is a policy aimed at helping the world's poor, it's interesting to imagine what a policy aimed at hurting the world's poor would look like.
- Linda McQuaig, All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)
On the social front, we have a country where half of the population is poor, with a completely torn social fabric. More than 20 million Argentines cannot live in dignity because they are prisoners of a system that only generates more poverty. As the great Jesús Huerta de Soto says, anti-poverty plans generate more poverty. The only way out of poverty is more freedom.
- Javier Milei, Inaugural Address, 10 December 2023
I was especially fascinated by the fact that global extreme poverty, contrary to the World Bank’s claims but according to its own data, seemed to have decreased from 38 to 29 per cent in the 1990s. I explained that poverty continued to decline rapidly and presented an extremely optimistic forecast that this could be halved by 2015. It was far exceeded. In 2015, extreme poverty was around 10 per cent. Between 2000 and 2022, extreme poverty decreased in a way we have never seen before – from 29.1 per cent of the world’s population to 8.4 per cent. (As recently as 1981, the figure stood at more than 40 per cent.) For the first time in history, fewer than one in ten people were poor. Despite the fact that the world population increased by more than 1.5 billion people during this period, the number of poor decreased by more than 1.1 billion. That is the greatest thing that has ever happened to mankind. The relentless hardship that most of humanity has suffered throughout its existence has been pushed back faster than ever in more places than ever. It is such a remarkable development that I must admit that I find it difficult to take writers and pundits seriously who do not take it as a central point of departure when analysing our time. A common objection is that this poverty reduction is not real because it ‘is just China’. It is a little strange to dismiss a country that holds one in five of the world’s inhabitants when talking about global development. Furthermore, it’s wrong. Even if China is removed from the 1990–2019 dataset, global poverty has been reduced by almost two-thirds, from 28.5 to around 10 per cent.
- Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)

What we've been hearing from the panelists is how the global food system works right now... It's based on large multinational companies, private profits, and very low international transfers to help poor people (sometimes no transfers at all). It's based on the extreme irresponsibility of powerful countries with regard to the environment. And it's based on a radical denial of the economic rights of poor people... We've just heard from the Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many point a finger of blame at the DRC and other poor countries for their poverty. Yet we don't seem to remember, or want to remember, that starting around 1870, King Leopold of Belgium created a slave colony in the Congo that lasted for around 40 years; and then the government of Belgium ran the colony for another 50 years. In 1961, after independence of the DRC, the CIA then assassinated the DRC's first popular leader, Patrice Lumumba, and installed a US-backed dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, for roughly the next 30 years. And in recent years, Glencore and other multinational companies suck out the DRC's cobalt without paying a level of royalties and taxes. We simply don't reflect on the real history of the DRC and other poor countries struggling to escape from poverty. Instead, we point fingers at these countries and say, “What's wrong with you? Why don't you govern yourselves properly?”
- Jeffrey Sachs', Speech at the UN Food Systems Pre-summit, Speech transcript (October 2021)

Our basic premise is that money and jobs are not the final answer to the black man’s problems. Without in any sense denying the overwhelming reality of poverty, we must affirm that the basic goal is not “welfare colonialism,” as some have called the anti-poverty and other federal programs, but the inclusion of black people at all levels of decision-making. We do not seek to be mere recipients from the decision-making process but participants in it. [...] It is our hope that the day may soon come when black people will reject federal funds because they have understood that these programs are geared to pacification rather than to genuine solutions. We hope that the rising level of consciousness may bring a rejection of such doles. This will strike many readers as fantastic, but they might recall that once in India, Gandhi rejected relief food shipments from England precisely because he saw them as tools of pacification.
- Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Vintage Books. 1967. p. 183. ISBN 978-0-394-70033-5.