decent article on neoliberal love affair with growth:
“Economic growth cuts poverty!” is forever the inveterate, unrelenting dictum of World Bank statisticians. These four simple words, stale and contentious as they are, were in fact the title of a recent Forbes magazine article based on World Bank predictions for eliminating poverty in South East Asia[1]. As reported in the American journal that speaks to the super-rich, if economic growth continues to increase in this region of the world with the largest concentration of poor people, then “poverty can be significantly reduced, if not eliminated, within a generation.”
(...) The bank’s Chief Economist, François Bourguignon, was careful to point out that these figures “go beyond growth” to ask how income is distributed and whether health care and education are conjointly improving, but the unspoken assumptions remained clear; globalisation is good, free trade and liberalisation is a prerequisite for ending poverty, and the only answer to human needs is a market-based world economy as defined by the Washington Consensus.
(...) As one commentator in the UK wrote[6]: “That the key global economic statistic has for so long been derived by means which are patently useless is a telling indication of how little the men who run the world care about the impact of their policies. If they cannot be bothered even to produce a meaningful measure of global poverty, we have no reason to believe their claim that they wish to address it.”
(...) The survey of data goes on to quote a number of putative successes; real per capita income growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been stronger in the period since 2000 “than any time since the 1960s”, it says, alongside higher growth rates in middle income countries, and there is no hesitation in asserting that “one factor behind this performance is strong macroeconomic polices”, in other words, those policies known collectively as economic liberalism. This growth in low-income countries, it goes on to brazenly attest, has “clearly resulted” in lower poverty incidence.
(...) Does the “rapid global growth” in 2006, in this context, really provide cause for the “optimism about progress in advancing the Millennium Development Goals” as the World Bank continues to submit? Is just under one billion people living in extreme poverty, about a sixth of the human population, with almost half of the remaining developing world living on two dollars a day, really cause for a note of “optimism” at all?
(...) This year has also seen the release of a number of independent and disquieting studies into poverty and wealth distribution; according to the recent McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures in the US, for example, the number of poor Americans living in deep or severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, growing by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005, what they described as “a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion.”[8] Poverty levels are falling, says the World Bank. Poverty levels, at least on a national basis in the richest countries, are actually increasing like never before, say the independent studies. In the UK, even the latest official figures show that poverty has increased for the first time since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.[9]
(...) The key issue concerns not just poverty levels and the misleading ‘dollar a day’ measure, but the corresponding crisis of inequality. The World Bank report freely admitted that despite abject poverty being on an apparent decline in global terms, inequality among citizens in the same country is on the rise. In the past decade, it also admits, poverty reduction was not always or everywhere commensurate with income growth. As contemporary studies have shown[10], inequality is in fact harmful to economic growth, and income distribution is not only worsening year-on-year, but it results in the paradox of overall decreasing poverty levels and a simultaneous increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty.
(...) The income gap has so widened, according to a recent analysis of tax data in the US[11], that the top 10 percent of Americans have reached a level of national income share not seen since before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The top one percent of wage earners, it showed, saw an increase of 14 percent, compared to an overall percentage decrease in earnings for 90 percent of the country. The income gap is growing faster in the US, as other figures reveal[12], than in any other developed nation.
(...) The US government, meanwhile, continues to argue that its tax policies, benefiting the top one percent of the country more than anyone else, are not adding to the widening income gap but are simply “more progressive”[15]. Higher taxes for the rich, they argue, would cause top earners to work less and take fewer risks, thereby stifling the deity of economic growth and threatening the goose that lays the golden eggs, a claim left unsupported by a shred of economic theory or empirical evidence[16].
(...) ...belief in the panacea of economic growth could be called the noumena of today’s world leaders, as without it the ideological premise of the Washington Consensus and it’s ‘ten prescriptions’ would crumble before our eyes; liberalisation and privatisation only make sense if market forces are continually unleashed in the blind pursuit of infinite expansion. Another rudimentary metaphor to add to the trickle-down theorists limited repertoire, in this sense, might be the description of a cancerous tumour.