PHA-Exchange> Poverty And Inequality-A Question Of Justice

[Claudio]

From: Ruggiero, Mrs. Ana Lucia (WDC) 

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 



"....Whenever the United Nations and its plethora of associated agencies opine about the scandal of world poverty, figures on inequality always pour forth, writes The Economist.



It is not bad enough, apparently, that enormous numbers of people 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 scandal, 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].."





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