O editorial de hoje do Financial Times debruça-se sobre as questões do desenvolvimento económico e da pobreza extrema, tópicos já aqui abordados. Vale a pena ler.
"Let us start with the good news. Never has so great a proportion of the world’s people been free of extreme poverty. In 1981, two-fifths of the world’s population lived under the extreme “dollar-a-day” poverty line; in 2001 the figure was one fifth. The world economy has rarely grown faster over a sustained period, and very large, very poor countries are major sources of that growth. This growth presents political and especially environmental challenges, but it is a dramatic development success story.
What is more, while there are obstacles ahead, there is every reason to hope that this progress can continue, lifting many more people out of poverty. Everyone who cares about the fate of the world’s poor should be celebrating far more than they tend to.
But it is hard to feel too cheery when war and famine lurk on the doorstep. Dramatic progress in poverty reduction notwithstanding, hundreds of millions of people live in countries that are extremely poor and look likely to stay that way. Development economist Paul Collier has dubbed them the “bottom billion”. Their plight is one of the big policy challenges of the new year – and for many years to come. The institutions charged with thinking about these problems are aid agencies. But development requires much more than aid – indeed, it frequently does not require aid at all. It is not that the aid industry does a bad job – if truth be told, some aid agencies are excellent, some are not, and donor governments have not made it a priority to find out which is which. But the difficulty is more profound: aid is not, mostly, what the poorest countries lack..." (o resto do editorial pode ser lido aqui)
What is more, while there are obstacles ahead, there is every reason to hope that this progress can continue, lifting many more people out of poverty. Everyone who cares about the fate of the world’s poor should be celebrating far more than they tend to.
But it is hard to feel too cheery when war and famine lurk on the doorstep. Dramatic progress in poverty reduction notwithstanding, hundreds of millions of people live in countries that are extremely poor and look likely to stay that way. Development economist Paul Collier has dubbed them the “bottom billion”. Their plight is one of the big policy challenges of the new year – and for many years to come. The institutions charged with thinking about these problems are aid agencies. But development requires much more than aid – indeed, it frequently does not require aid at all. It is not that the aid industry does a bad job – if truth be told, some aid agencies are excellent, some are not, and donor governments have not made it a priority to find out which is which. But the difficulty is more profound: aid is not, mostly, what the poorest countries lack..." (o resto do editorial pode ser lido aqui)
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