Development Indicators

Question 1

Poverty definition

Answer 1

• Historically, researchers and analysts used monetary measures to define poverty: households living on less than $1 or $2 a day
• Adjusted with inflation: the poverty line between 2008 and 2015 was $1.25US a day; the World Bank raised this to $1.90US in 2015
• Poverty line = arbitrary; millions living just above it are poor & vulnerable to price shocks and household disasters

Question 2

GDP (gross development product)

Answer 2

• During the Modernization Theory era, policymakers + scholars measured wealth according to GDP- a measure of national economic output
  presupposes equitable resource distribution, ignores inequality

Question 3

Limits of measuring GDP

Answer 3

• High-inequality societies need to grow a lot quicker to reduce the same amount of poverty compared to low inequality societies
• A focus on GDP = promotion of policies that would boost industrial output & sidelined subsistence agriculture which threatens food security and traditional ways of life

Question 4

Non-monetary poverty measures

Answer 4

• Infant mortality, life expectancy, and literacy rates = robust predictors of poverty
• Women tend to have less access to education & lower female literacy rates point to differential poverty levels according to gender
• Increasingly understand poverty as being intertwined with ecological factors = (SDGs) in 2015 adopted

Question 5

Case study: UN SG- Access to Banking for Women

Answer 5

• 58% of women have a bank account compared to 65% of men.
• This means that 1.1 billion women remain unbanked
• These inequalities persist despite evidence that women are good money managers
• In Latin America, women led small-to-medium enterprises default on payments 54% less often than men’s and although they invest 50% less than male entrepreneurs, they tend to make 20% more in revenue
• UN has emphasized the mobile banking using biometric ID to provide the rural poor with financial inclusion
• Such programmes have already succeeded ex in Kenya and India

Question 6

Case study- Poverty Alleviation: Brazil’s Bolsa Familia

Answer 6

• Poverty tends to be transgenerational
• Under left-leaning President Lula Da Silva, Brazil adopted the Bolsa Familia (“family subsidy”) program in 2003
• The Bolsa is a conditional cash transfer program: provides financial aid to poor Brazilian families, and requires in exchange that parents send their children to school and vaccinate them

Question 7

Implementing the Bolsa Familia

Answer 7

• Whenever possible, it is disbursed to the female head of a household
• This program addresses poverty in short-term and long-term ways
• About 26% of the population is registered
• The Bolsa helped bring poverty down by 27.7% from 2003-06

Question 8

Path Dependency

Answer 8

Histories of colonization, war, and development policy play key roles in determining levels of wealth and inequality

Question 9

Human capital: shaped by pd

Answer 9

People’s skills and capabilities, related to their education, which shape their economic productivity