Eliminating human poverty: macroeconomic & social policies for equitable growth

This book focuses on the provision of basic social services – in particular, access to education, health and water supplies – as the central building blocks of any human development strategy. The authors concentrate on how these basic social services can be financed and delivered more effectively to achieve the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals. Their analysis, which departs from the dominant macroeconomic paradigm, deploys, the results of the broad-ranging research they led at UNICEF and the UNDP, investigating the record on basic social services of some thirty developing countries. In seeking to learn from the new data from this research, they develop an analytical argument around two potential synergies; at the macro-level, between poverty reduction, human development and economic growth, and at the micro-level, between interventions to provide basic social services. Policymakers, they argue, can integrate macroeconomic and social policy. Fiscal, monetary, and other macroeconomic policies can be compatible with social-sector requirements. The authors make the case that policymakers have more flexibility than is usually suggested by orthodox writers and international financial institutions, and that if policymakers engaged in alternative macroeconomic and growth-oriented policies, this could lead to the expansion of human capabilities and the fulfillment of human rights. This book explores some of these policy options. Eliminating Human poverty also argues that more than just additional aid is needed. Specific strategic shifts in the areas of aid policy, decentralized governance, health and education policy and the private-public mix in service provision are prerequisites to achieving the goals of human development. The combination of governance reforms and fiscal and macroeconomic policies outlined in this book can eliminate human poverty in the span of a generation.