The End of Poverty By Jeffrey Sachs

Just now i completed reading The End of Poverty By Jeffrey Sachs

Great book written by Jeffrey Sachs.

More Information About the Author can be found in wikipedia.

More Information about the book can be found in this site

Few points i want to share from the book

1) Fifteen thousand Africans dying each and every day of preventable,treatable diseases—AIDS, malaria, TB—for lack of drugs that we take for granted.

2)Authors visit Blantyre, where we visit the main hospital in Malawi, Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. There we experience our second shock of the day. This hospital is the place where the government of Malawi is keen to begin a treatment program for the roughly nine hundred thousand Malawians infected with the HIV virus and currently dying of AIDS because of lack of treatment. The hospital has set up a walk-in clinic for people who can afford to pay the dollar a day cost of the antiretroviral combination therapy, based on Malawi's arrangements with the Indian generic drug producer Cipla, which has pioneered the provision of lowcost antiretroviral drugs to poor countries. Since the government is too impoverished to be able to afford a dollar a day for all those in need, the program has begun for those few Malawians who can afford to pay out of pocket. At the time of our visit, this treatment site is providing anti-AIDS drugs on a daily basis to about four hundred people who can afford it—four hundred people in a country where nine hundred thousand are infected. For the rest, there is essentially no access to anti-AIDS medicines.

3) Bangladesh was born in a war for independence against Pakistan in 1971.

4) If economic development is a ladder with higher rungs representing steps up the path to economic well-being, there are roughly one billion people around the world, one sixth of humanity, who live as the Malawians do: too ill, hungry, or destitute even to get a foot on the first rung of the development ladder. These people are the "poorest of the poor," or the "extreme poor" of the planet. They all live in developing countries (poverty does exist in rich countries, but it is not extreme poverty). Of course, not all of these one billion people are dying today, but they are all fighting for survival each day. If they are the victims of a serious drought or flood, or an episode of serious illness, or a collapse of the world market
price of their cash crop, the result is likely to be extreme suffering and perhaps even death. Cash earnings are pennies a day.

5) Our generation's challenge is to help the poorest of the poor to escape the misery of extreme poverty so that they may begin their own ascent up the ladder of economic development. The end of poverty, in this sense, is not only the end of extreme suffering but also the beginning of economic progress and of the hope and security that accompany economic development.

6) If we are to understand why a vast gap between rich and poor exists today,we must return to the very recent period of human history when this divide emerged. The past two centuries, since around 1800, constitute a unique era in economic history, a period the great economic historian Simon Kuznets famously termed the period of modern economic growth. Before then, indeed for thousands of years, there had been virtually no sustained economic growth in the world, and only gradual increases in the human population. The world population had risen gradually from around 230 million people at the start of the first millennium in A.D. 1, to perhaps 270 million by A.D. 1000, and 900 million people by A.D. 1800. Real living standards were even slower to change.

7) The crucial puzzle for understanding today's vast inequalities,therefore, is to understand why different regions of the world have grown at different rates during the period of modern economic growth.Every region began the period in extreme poverty. Only one sixth of the world's population achieved high-income status through consistent economic growth. Another two thirds have risen to middle-income status with more modest rates of economic growth. One sixth of humanity is stuck in extreme poverty, with very low rates of economic growth during the whole period.

8) The most common explanation for why countries fail to achieve economic growth often focuses on the faults of the poor: poverty is a result of corrupt leadership and retrograde cultures that impede modern development.

9) Over the span of two centuries, the innovation gap is certainly one of the most fundamental reasons why the richest and the poorest countries have diverged, and why the poorest of the poor have not been able to get a foothold on growth. The rich move from innovation to greater wealth to further innovation; the poor do not. Fortunately, there are a few opportunities for innovation, although these are not as robust as we would hope.

10) China's population of 1.3 billion constitutes more than a fifth of humanity.Asia's population, in total, includes 60 percent of humanity.

Probably no country in the world, not even Russia, has experienced the extent of tumult and swings from misery to triumph, economically and socially, that China has since its revolution of 1949.

11) At the time of independence, India's literacy was only 17 percent. Public health was also badly neglected. Life expectancy in 1947 was a mere 32.5 years.

12) Using Maddison's data, India experienced no per capita growth from 1600 to 1870.Per capita economic growth during the period 1870 to independence in 1947 was a meager 0.2 percent per year, compared with 1 percent in the UK.

13) A few years back, Kenya's Sauri's residents cooked with locally collected fuel wood, but the decline in the number of trees has left the sublocation bereft of sufficient fuel wood. The quarter or so households who are using the ICRAF system of improved fallows, based on leguminous trees,have a dedicated supply of fuel wood. Other farmer households do not.Villagers said that they now buy pieces of fuel wood in Yala or Muhanda (both a few kilometers away), a bundle of seven sticks costing around twenty-five shillings (thirty cents). These seven sticks are barely sufficient for cooking one meal. In our meeting with the villagers, I conveyed
astonishment at the price, thirty cents per meal, for a community that earns almost no money at all. A woman responded that many villagers had in fact reverted to cooking with cow dung or to eating uncooked meals.

As this village dies of hunger, AIDS, and malaria, its isolation is stunning.There are no cars or trucks owned or even used within Sauri, and only a handful of villagers said they had ridden in any kind of motorized transport during the past year. Only three or four of the two hundred or so said that they get to the regional city of Kisumu each month, and about the same number said that they had been to Nairobi, Kenya's commercial and political capital, four hundred kilometers away, once during the past year. There are virtually no remittances reaching the village.Indeed, there is virtually no cash income of any kind reaching the village. Given the farmers' meager production, farm output must be used almost entirely for the household's own consumption, rather than for sales in the market. The community has no money for fertilizers,medicines, school fees, or other basic needs that must be purchased from outside of the villages. Around half of the individuals at the meeting said that they had never made a phone call in their entire lives.(Ironically, and promisingly, our own mobile phones worked fine in the village, relying on a cell tower in Yala. Extending low-cost telephony to the village, for example based on a mobile phone shared by the community, would therefore pose no infrastructure problems.)

14) The end of poverty must start in the villages of Sauri,kenya and the slums of Mumbai, and millions of places like them.The key to ending poverty is to create a global network of connections that reach from impoverished communities to the very centers of world power and wealth and back again.

15) When India created its Indian Institutes of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s, development experts expressed skepticism that such advanced and rarified educational programs really belonged in such an impoverished country. Decades later we see the remarkable fruit of those investments in scientific research capacity. The institutes not only produced the generation of information technology engineers that
are now powering India's IT boom, but they also created teams of scientists able to harness that technology specifically to meet India's needs. Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the IIT, Chennai, for example,designed appropriate local-loop wireless technology that has helped millions of Indian villagers to get online.

16) Ending global poverty by 2025 will require concerted actions by the rich countries as well as the poor, beginning with a "global compact" between the rich and poor countries.The poor countries must take ending poverty seriously, and will have to devote a greater share of their national resources to cutting poverty rather than to war, corruption,and political infighting. The rich countries will need to move beyond the platitudes of helping the poor, and follow through on their repeated promises to deliver more help. All of this is possible. Indeed, it is much more likely than it seems. But it needs a framework. My colleagues and Sachs in the UN Millennium Project have proposed just such a framework, focused on the period until 2015, called the Millennium Development Goals-Based Poverty Reduction Strategy.

17) Today's situation is a bit like the old Soviet workers' joke: "We pretend to work, and you pretend to pay us!" Many poor countries today pretend to reform while rich countries pretend to help them, raising the cynicism to a pretty high level. Many low-income countries go through the motions of reform, doing little in practice and expecting even less in return. The aid agencies, on their part, focus on projects at a symbolic rather than national scale, just big enough to make good headlines.

18) A sound public management plan should have six components to eradicate poverty

Decentralization. Investments are needed in hundreds of thousands of villages and thousands of cities. The details will have to be decided at the ground level, in the villages and cities themselves, rather than in the capitals or in Washington. Decentralized management of public investment is therefore a sine quanon of scaling up.

• Training. The public sector at all levels—national, district, village—lacks the talent to oversee the scaling-up process. This is not a case for evading the public sector, which will not work, but for building the capacity of the public sector. Training programs (or capacity building) should be part of the overall strategy.

• Information Technologies. If the aid plumbing is going to carrymuch larger flows of aid each year, we will need better meters,which will mean the use of information technologies—computers,e-mail, mobile phones—to increase dramatically the amount of information transmitted in the public sector and accessible to all parties.

• Measurable Benchmarks. Much clearer targets of what is to be achieved must accompany a major increase of spending. Every MDG-based poverty reduction strategy should be supported by quantitative benchmarks tailored to national conditions, needs, and data availability.

• Audits. Let's face it: the money has to reach the intended recipients. No country should receive greater funding unless the money can be audited.

• Monitoring and Evaluation. Right from the start, the MDG-based poverty reduction strategy should prepare to have the investments monitored and evaluated. Budgets and mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation should be essential parts of the strategies.

19) Here are nine steps to the goal to end poverty by 2025.

Commit to Ending Poverty
The first step is commitment to the task. Ox¬fam and many other leaders in civil society have embraced a goal, Making Poverty History. The world as a whole needs now to embrace that goal. We have committed to halving poverty by 2015. Let us commit to ending extreme poverty by 2025.

Adopt a Plan of Action
The Millennium Development Goals are the down payment on ending poverty. They are specific, quantified, and already promised in a Global Compact of Rich and Poor. Not only should the world community recommit to those goals, but its leaders should adopt a specific global plan to meet the Millennium Development Goals
of the sort outlined in chapter 15, and offered in detail by the UN Millennium Project.

Raise the Voice of the Poor
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King,Jr., did not wait for the rich and powerful to come to their rescue. They asserted their call to justice and made their stand in the face of official arrogance and neglect. The poor cannot wait for the rich to issue the call to justice. The G8 will never champion the end of poverty if the poor themselves are silent. It is time for the world's democracies in the poor world—Brazil, India, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and dozens of others—to unite to issue the call to action. The poor are starting to find their voice, in the G3 (Brazil, India, South Africa), the G20 (a trade grouping that negotiates within the WTO), and elsewhere. The world needs to hear more.

Redeem the Role of the United States in the World
The richest and most powerful country in the world, long the leader and inspiration in democratic ideals, has become the most feared and divisive country in recent years. The self-professed quest by the United States for unchallenged supremacy and freedom of action has been a disaster, and it poses one of the greatest risks to global stability. The lack of U.S. participation in multilateral initiatives has undermined global security and progress toward social justice and environmental protection. Its own interests have been undermined by this unilateral turn. Forged in the crucible of the Enlightenment, the United States can become a champion of Enlightened Globalization. Political action within the United States and
from abroad will be needed to restore its role on the road toward global peace and justice.

Rescue the IMF and the World Bank
Our leading international financial institutions are needed to play a decisive role in ending global poverty.They have the experience and technical sophistication to play an important role. They have the internal motivation of a highly professional staff. Yet they have been badly used, indeed misused, as creditor-run agencies rather than international institutions representing all of their 182 member governments. It is time to restore the international role of these agencies so that they are no longer the handmaidens of creditor governments, but the champions of economic justice and enlightened globalization.

Strengthen the United Nations
It is no use blaming the UN for the missteps of recent years. We have gotten the UN that has been willed by the powerful countries of the world, especially the United States. Why are UN agencies less operational than they should be? Not because of UN bureaucracy, though that exists, but because the powerful countries are
reluctant to cede more authority to international institutions, fearing reduction of their own freedom of maneuver. The UN specialized agencies have a core role to play in the end of poverty. It is time to empower the likes of the UN Children's Fund, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and many others to do the job—on die ground, country by country—that they are uniquely qualified to lead, helping the poorest of the poor to use modern science and technology to overcome the trap of poverty.

Harness Global Science
Science has been the key to development from the very start of the industrial revolution, the fulcrum by which reason is translated into technologies of social advance. As Condorcet predicted,science has empowered technological advances in food production,health, environmental management, and countless other basic sectors of production and human need. Yet science tends to follow market forces as well as to lead them. It is not surprising, I have noted repeatedly,that the rich get richer in a continuing cycle of endogenous growth, whereas the poorest of the poor are often left outside of this virtuous circle. When their needs are specific—by virtue of particular diseases,or crops, or ecological conditions—their problems are bypassed by global science. Therefore, a special effort of world science, led by global scientific research centers of governments, academia, and industry,must commit specifically to addressing the unmet challenges of the poor. Public funding, private philanthropies, and not-for-profit foundations will have to back these commitments, precisely because market forces alone will not suffice.

Promote Sustainable Development
While targeted investments in health,education, and infrastructure can unlock the trap of extreme poverty,the continuing environmental degradation at local, regional, and planetary scales threatens the long-term Sustainability of all our social gains. Ending extreme poverty can relieve many of the pressures on the environment.When impoverished households are more productive on their farms, they face less pressure to cut down neighboring forests in search of new farmland. When their children survive with high probability,they have less incentive to maintain very high fertility rates with the attendant downside of rapid population growth. Still, even as extreme poverty ends, the environmental degradation related to industrial
pollution and the long-term climate change associated with massive use of fossil fuels will have to be addressed. There are ways to confront these environmental challenges without destroying prosperity (for example,by building smarter power plants that capture and dispose of their carbon emissions and by increasing use of renewable energy sources). As we invest in ending extreme poverty, we must face the ongoing challenge of investing in the global Sustainability of the world's ecosystems.

Make a Personal Commitment
In the end, however, it comes back to us,as individuals. Individuals, working in unison, form and shape societies. Social commitments are commitments of individuals. Great social forces, Robert Kennedy powerfully reminded us, are the mere accumulation of individual actions. His words are more powerful today than
ever:

Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills—against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence . . . Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation . . . It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.


Below are the Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Foreword by Bono xv

Introduction 1
1. Global Family Portrait 5
2. The Spread of Economic Prosperity 26
3. Why Some Countries Fail to Thrive 51
4. Clinical Economics 74
5. Bolivia's High-Altitude Hyperinflation 90
6. Poland's Return to Europe 109
7. Reaping the Whirlwind: Russia's Struggle for Normalcy 131
8. China: Catching Up After Half a Millenium 148
9. India's Market Reforms: The Triumph of Hope Over Fear 170
10. The Voiceless Dying: Africa and Disease 188
11. The Millennium, 9/11, and the United Nations 210
12. On-the-Ground Solutions for Ending Poverty 226
13. Making the Investments Needed to End Poverty 244
14. A Global Compact to End Poverty 266
15. Can the Rich Afford to Help the Poor? 288
16. Myths and Magic Bullets 309
17. Why We Should Do It 329
18. Our Generation's Challenge 347

Works Cited 369
Further Reading 372
Notes 376
Index 385

Hope you enjoy reading this book.

About The Author

Jeffrey David Sachs (born November 5, 1954, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American economist and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Additionally, he is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and the founder and co-President of the Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. From 2002 to 2006, he was the Director of the United Nations Millennium Project and today remains a leading advocate for the Millennium Development Goals, eight internationally endorsed objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger, and disease by the year 2015.

Originally one of the youngest economics professors in the history of Harvard University, Sachs became renowned for his work on the challenges of economic development, environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, debt cancellation, and globalization. He has authored numerous books and articles on these subjects, including The End of Poverty and Common Wealth, both New York Times bestsellers. He has been named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” several times.

Sachs lives in New York City with his wife Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, a pediatrician. They have three children.