سیاست اقتصادی، توزیع و فقر: طبیعت اختلافات

The last 20 years have seen growing areas of agreement on poverty reduction strategies, but disagreements on economic policy, distribution and poverty seem to have intensified. This paper tries to identify the underlying nature of these disagreements, related to differences in perspective and framework between “Finance Ministry” and “Civil Society” tendencies. It is argued that the deep divisions one sees can be located in differences in the level of aggregation adopted, the time horizon considered, and assumptions made on market structure and power. Mutual understanding could be advanced by further exploration of these differences, and the adoption by both sides of the approach of dialogue rather than negotiation.

The end of history lasted for such a short time. If the early 1990s raised hopes of a broad-based consensus on economic policy for growth, equity and poverty reduction, the late 1990s dashed them. The East Asian crisis and the Seattle debacle saw to that. In the year 2000, the Governors of the World Bank, whose mission it is to eradicate poverty, could meet only under police protection, besieged by those who believe instead that the institution and the policies it espouses cause poverty. The street demonstrations in Prague, Seattle and Washington, DC, are one end of a spectrum of disagreement, which includes vigorous debate in the pages of the leading newspapers, passionate involvement of faith-based organizations, and the genteel cut and thrust of academic discourse. The last two years have seen my involvement in an extensive process of consultation on poverty reduction strategies.1 The consultation reached out to most interested constituencies in the academic, policy making and advocacy communities. It covered the international financial institutions (IFIs) and the myriad UN specialized agencies, Government Ministries in the North and the South, Northern aid agencies, academic analysts in rich and poor countries, Northern and Southern advocacy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and NGOs with ground-level operations working with the poor. It involved a global electronic consultation, as well as conventional written contributions, and scores of meetings. A particularly valuable exercise was the systematic attempt to elicit directly the “Voices of the Poor” through participatory assessments. This paper presents an analysis of the broad themes of disagreement in these consultations and more generally among those concerned with poverty reduction. It has to be noted first of all that there are swathes of agreement in areas where there would not have been consensus two decades ago. Any discussion of disagreements has to start with an acknowledgement of these areas of agreement. But, clearly, there are deep divisions on economic policy, distribution and poverty. These divisions spilled out in the consultations, mostly politely but sometimes in vehement discourse, written and oral, harbingers of the street battles to come. The paper tries to answer an obvious question: How can people with seemingly the same ends disagree so much about means, and how can seemingly the same objective reality be interpreted so differently? The simple answer, which the protagonists themselves often provide, is of course to question the motives or the analytical capacity of those one disagrees with. The suggestion that “the others” are either not truly interested in attacking poverty (quite the opposite, in fact), or that they make elementary errors of fact or interpretation, is never very far below the surface. It is argued here, however, that at least some of the disagreement can be understood in terms of differences in perspective and framework. Understanding disagreements in these terms—rather than in terms of motives or intelligence—is more conducive to encouraging dialogue rather than confrontation. The object of this paper is to provide an account of some of the underlying reasons for deep disagreements on economic policy, distribution and poverty, and to couch these in an analytical rather than a rhetorical frame. But before doing this we need to say a little more about disagreements over what and disagreements between whom.

When the institution whose self-stated mission it is to eradicate poverty can only hold its Annual Meetings under siege from those who believe its mission is to further the cause of the rich and powerful, there is clearly a gap to be bridged. Moreover, the gap is not just between the IFI's and their critics. There is a growing divide on key areas of economic policy, even as agreement broadens in other areas. Indeed, the conflict over economic policy gets more intense as the areas of disagreement shrink to what seem to be an irreduceable core. This paper has argued that underlying the seemingly intractable differences are key differences of perspective and framework on Aggregation, Time Horizon and Market Structure. Simply recognizing and understanding the underlying nature of the disagreements in these terms would be one step in bridging the gap. But more is needed. More is needed from both sides, but my focus here is on Group A. For those at the more academic end of that spectrum, the message is that explicitly taking into account these complications is more likely to shift the intellectual frontier than falling back yet again on conventional analysis.5 For those at the more operational and policy end of the spectrum, especially those in policy-making and policy-implementing institutions, the message is that recognizing and trying to understand legitimate alternative views on economic policy, being open and nuanced in messages rather than being closed and hard, is not only good analytics, it is good politics as well. Corresponding author contact information This paper is based on an invited presentation to the Swedish Parliamentary Commission on Global Development (Globkom) on 22 September 2000. I am grateful to Mia Horn-af-Rantzien, Secretary of the Commission, for her encouragement to produce a written version of the presentation. These ideas have also been presented at meetings organized by the Canadian Ministry of Finance in Ottawa, the World Food Day Symposium at Cornell University, the PREM network of the World Bank, and the Faculty of Social Studies seminar at the University of Warwick. I am grateful to the participants in these meetings for their constructive comments. The observations in this paper are based on my operational experiences over the last few years. For more formal academic assessment of the literature on distribution, poverty and development see Kanbur, R. (2000). Income distribution and development. In A. B. Atkinson, & F. Bourguignon (Eds.), Handbook of income distribution (Vol. I). Amsterdam: North Holland, and Kanbur, R. (1998). Poverty reduction strategies: five perennial questions. In R. Culpeper, & C. McAskie (Eds.), Towards autonomous development in Africa. Ottawa: The North–South Institute, Ottawa. For an assessment of the implications for development assistance, see Kanbur, R., Sandler, T., & Morrison, K. (1999). The future of development assistance. Washington, DC: Overseas Development Council, and for World Bank specific commentary see Kanbur, R., & Vines, D. (2000). The World Bank and poverty reduction: past, present and future. In C. Gilbert, & D. Vines (Eds.), The World Bank: structure and policies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1 Most of this consultation was under the auspices of the World Bank's World Development Report on Poverty, of which I was Director until I resigned in May 2000. 2 In July 1999 I was involved in an immersion exercise organized by SEWA and the German Institute for North-South Dialogue. Officials from aid agencies and parliaments were taken by SEWA to experience for a few days the lives of the women SEWA works for and with. 3 I include myself among those who have had such reactions. 4 As the World Bank's Chief Economist for Africa, in 1995–96 I was a member of the joint World Bank/IMF Task Force which put together the first proposal for debt relief to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC). 5 An equally interesting set of further analytical issues is opened up when interactions between Aggregation, Time Horizon and Market Structure are considered.