Publication: A Globalized Market--Opportunities and Risks for the Poor : Global Poverty Report 2001
Loading...
Published
2001-07
ISSN
Date
2014-09-17
Editor(s)
Abstract
The Global Poverty Report considers the effects of globalizing markets on poverty in developing countries. It outlines the channels through which increased trade openness can affect poverty and examines the evidence from four regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Written at the request of the G8, the report is the result of a joint effort of the regional development banks, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Increased openness can affect an economy in various ways, creating opportunities for the poor as well as risks. First, it can affect the prices of goods and services that the poor consume and produce, benefiting those who are net consumers of goods that become cheaper and those who can obtain higher prices for their products on international markets. Second, it can affect the demand for and returns to factors of production that the poor have to offer, such as labor. Third, it can affect government revenue and the resources available for antipoverty programs. Fourth, it can influence the potential for economic growth, which in turn affects poverty. Fifth, the short-term costs of transition, as well as the possible increased volatility of growth stemming from the opening up of markets, may increase the need for social protection mechanisms. Comprehensive trade reform can help reduce poverty when it is part of a set of reforms that improve the domestic macroeconomic and investment climate, enhance infrastructure and technology, and contribute to the provision of knowledge and skills. However, these effects vary significantly across countries, regions, and groups within countries, which makes it difficult to generalize about the effects of trade liberalization on poverty.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“African Development Bank; Asian Development Bank; European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; Inter-American Development Bank; International Monetary Fund; World Bank. 2001. A Globalized Market--Opportunities and Risks for the Poor : Global Poverty Report 2001. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/20234 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication The Growth Report : Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008)The report has four main parts. In the first, the commission reviews the 13 economies that have sustained, high growth in the postwar period. Their growth models had some common flavors: the strategic integration with the world economy; the mobility of resources, particularly labor; the high savings and investment rates; and a capable government committed to growth. The report goes on to describe the cast of mind and techniques of policy making that leaders will need if they are to emulate such a growth model. It concludes that their policy making will need to be patient, pragmatic, and experimental. In the second part, the commission lays out the ingredients a growth strategy might include. These range from public investment and exchange rate policies to land sales and redistribution. A list of ingredients is not enough to make a dish, of course, as Bob Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a member of the Commission, points out. The commission, however, refrains from offering policy makers a recipe, or growth strategy, to follow. This is because no single recipe exists. Timing and circumstance will determine how the ingredients should be combined, in what quantities, and in what sequence. Formulating a full growth strategy, then, is not a job for this Commission but for a dedicated team of policy makers and economists, working on a single economy over time. Instead of a country-specific recipe, the commission offers some more general thoughts on the opportunities and constraints faced by nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, countries rich in resources, small states with fewer than 2 million people, and middle-income countries that have lost their economic momentum. In the final part of the report, the commission discusses global trends that are beyond the control of any single developing-country policy maker. Global warming is one example; the surge in protectionist sentiment another; the rise of commodity prices a third. In addition, the commission discusses the aging of the world population and the potential dangers of America's external deficit. These trends are new enough that the 13 high-growth economies of the postwar period did not have to face them. The question is whether they now make it impossible for other countries to emulate that postwar success.Publication Agricultural Price Distortions, Inequality, and Poverty(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-08)Reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions affecting agriculture in developing countries, particularly by cuts to agricultural export taxes and by some reductions in government assistance to agriculture in high-income countries, but international trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. This paper summarizes a series of empirical studies that focus on the effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade for poverty and inequality, especially in developing countries. To obtain different insights into the various impacts, two global studies are undertaken using the World Bank's Linkage model, one multi-country study uses the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model, and ten country case studies are also included, each using a national economy-wide model. The Linkage model results suggest that liberalization will reduce international inequality, largely by boosting farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries, and will reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent. The analysis based on the GTAP model for a sample of 15 countries, and the ten stand-alone national case studies, all point to larger reductions in poverty, especially if only the non-poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue.Publication The Challenge of Reducing International Trade and Migration Barriers(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-04)While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and freeing up the international movement of workers. A review of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated with these opportunities provides the foundation to undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of opportunities against those aimed at addressing the world's other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even without factoring in their contribution to alleviating several of the other challenges identified by that project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.Publication Equity and Growth in a Globalizing World : Commission on Growth and Development(World Bank, 2010)The commission on growth and development was established in April 2006 in response to two insights: people do not talk about growth enough, and when they do, they speak with unearned conviction. The workshops turned out to be intense, lively affairs, lasting up to three days. It became clear that experts do not always agree, even on issues that are central to growth. But the Commission had no wish to disguise or gloss over these uncertainties and differences. And it did not want to present a false confidence in its conclusions beyond that justified by the evidence. While researchers will continue to improve people's understanding of the world, policy makers cannot wait for scholars to satisfy all of their doubts or resolve their differences. Decisions must be made with only partial knowledge of the world. One consequence is that most policy decisions, however well informed, take on the character of experiments, which yield useful information about the way the world works, even if they do not always turn out the way policy makers had hoped. It is good to recognize this fact, if only so that policy makers can be quick to spot failures and learn from mistakes. In principle, a commission on growth could have confined its attention to income per person, setting aside the question of how income is distributed. But this commission chose otherwise. It recognized that growth is not synonymous with development. To contribute significantly to social progress, growth must lift everyone's sights and improve the living standards of a broad swath of society. The Commission has no truck with the view that growth only enriches the few, leaving poverty undisturbed and social ills untouched.Publication Globalization for Development : Trade, Finance, Aid, Migration, and Policy, Revised Edition(Washington, DC : World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Globalization has been taking place for centuries, moving from the colonization of the inhabited parts of the world to the appearance of nations, from conquests to independent countries, from sailboats and caravans to steamboats, truck fleets and cargo planes, from trade in a few commodities to global production and distribution networks and to the present explosion of international flows of services, capital, and information. This book also helps to shatter a false dichotomy that holds that policies that favor the poor cannot be pro-market. There is an enormous set of pro-poor and pro-market policies that allow for more equal market competition among and within countries, and that ask that policy take account of externalities as much as possible. The sheer size of today's global economy is a testament to the speed of change: in 2005, world economic output total US$35 trillion an amount likely to double by 2030, assuming modest continued growth. In this book the authors provide a comprehensive introduction to key aspects of globalization trade, finance, aid, and migration, and their complex linkages with poverty and development. This book also helps to shatter a false dichotomy that holds that policies that favor the poor cannot be pro-market. There is an enormous set of pro-poor and pro-market policies that allow for more equal market competition among and within countries, and that ask that policy take account of externalities as much as possible.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Services Unbound(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-09)Services are a new force for innovation, trade, and growth in East Asia and Pacific. The dramatic diffusion of digital technologies and partial policy reforms in services--from finance, communication, and transport to retail, health, and education--is transforming these economies. The result is higher productivity and changing jobs in the services sector, as well as in the manufacturing sectors that use these services. A region that has thrived through openness to trade and investment in manufacturing still maintains innovation-inhibiting barriers to entry and competition in key services sectors. 'Services Unbound: Digital Technologies and Policy Reform in East Asia and Pacific' makes the case for deeper domestic reforms and greater international cooperation to unleash a virtuous cycle of increased economic opportunity and enhanced human capacity that would power development in the region.Publication Morocco Economic Update, Winter 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03)Despite the drought causing a modest deceleration of overall GDP growth to 3.2 percent, the Moroccan economy has exhibited some encouraging trends in 2024. Non-agricultural growth has accelerated to an estimated 3.8 percent, driven by a revitalized industrial sector and a rebound in gross capital formation. Inflation has dropped below 1 percent, allowing Bank al-Maghrib to begin easing its monetary policy. While rural labor markets remain depressed, the economy has added close to 162,000 jobs in urban areas. Morocco’s external position remains strong overall, with a moderate current account deficit largely financed by growing foreign direct investment inflows, underpinned by solid investor confidence indicators. Despite significant spending pressures, the debt-to-GDP ratio is slowly declining.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication The Mexican Social Protection System in Health(World Bank, Washington DC, 2013-01)With a population of 113 million and a per-capita Gross Domestic Product, or GDP of US$10,064 (current U.S. dollars), Mexico is one of the largest and highest-income countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The country has benefited from sustained economic growth during the last decade, which was temporarily interrupted by the financial and economic crisis. Real GDP is projected to grow 3.8 percent and 3.6 percent in 2012 and 2013, respectively (International Monetary Fund, or IMF 2012). Despite this growth, poverty in the country remains high; with half of the population living below the national poverty line. The country is also highly heterogeneous, with large socioeconomic differences across states and across urban and rural areas. In 2010, while the extreme poverty ratio in the Federal District and the states of Colima and Nuevo Leon was below 3 percent, in Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca it was 25 percent or higher. These large regional differences are also found in other indicators of well-being, such as years of schooling, housing conditions, and access to social services. This case study assesses key features and achievements of the Social Protection System in Health (Sistema de Proteccion Social en Salud) in Mexico, and particularly of its main pillar, Popular Health Insurance (Seguro Popular, PHI). It analyzes the contribution of this policy to the establishment and implementation of universal health coverage in Mexico. In 2003, with the reform of the General Health Law, the PHI was institutionalized as a subsidized health insurance scheme open to the population not covered by the social security schemes. Today, the PHI covers all of its intended affiliates, about 52 million people