Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality?

By Robert H. Wade. International Journal of Health Services, 2004

801 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past 20 years or so, India, China, and the rest of East Asia experienced fast economic growth and falls in the poverty rate, Latin America stagnated, and the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa regressed. But what are the net trends? The neoliberal argument says that world poverty and income inequality fell over the past two decades for the first time in more than a century and a half, thanks to the rising density of economic integration across national borders. The evidence therefore confirms that globalization in the context of the world economic regime in place since the end of Bretton Woods generates more “mutual benefit” than “conflicting interests.” This article questions the empirical basis of the neoliberal argument.

Subfields: Development, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a6fd1773294da0392b4c8b234630c09f611bc1ca

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Citations in the corpus

The Globalization of Migration: Has the World Become More Migratory? 1 (2014, background): “Several of these factors, such as growing labor market segmentation and domestic inequality, are affected by the same political trends toward market liberalization and economic deregulation that have also boosted the economic globalization (cf. Wade, 2004).”
"Trade matters in the fight against poverty": narratives, perceptions, and (lack of) evidence in the case of fish trade in Africa. (2010, background): “Nevertheless, for poverty alleviation to occur, or even for economic growth to take place, wealth created from the fisheries sector must “trickle down” through some form of redistribution mechanism (Basu, 2006; Kalwij & Verschoor, 2007; Reddy, 2003; Wade, 2004).”
What strategies are viable for developing countries today? The World Trade Organization and the shrinking of ‘development space’ (2003, background): “…of the living standards of North America and Western Europe half a century from now–suggests the need for non-market measures of intervention and for refocusing international cooperation around ‘development’ principles rather than ‘reciprocity’ and ‘no distortions’ principles (Wade, 2003b).”
Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to global environmental change: challenges and pathways for an action-oriented research agenda for middle-income and low-income countries (2010, background): “Economic globalization and neoliberal reforms have resulted in marked income disparities and a weakened capacity of the nation state to respond to IAV challenges [9,20,30,31].”
China Is Poorer Than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty (2008, critical): “…was chosen as being representative of the 13 In the light of these observations, we clearly do not accept the claim by Reddy and Pogge (2002) and Wade (2004) that we lowered the real value of the poverty line in Chen and Ravallion (2001) (as compared to Ravallion et al., 1991) because its real…”
Understanding the relationships between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation: A conceptual framework (2014, positive): “A focal point is developing, representing a coincidence of agendas between an environmental community seeking to broaden constituencies for sustainability (Roe, 2008), and the development community, responding in part to the changing characteristics and distribution of global poverty (e.g. Sumner, 2”
How Have the World's Poorest Fared since the Early 1980s? (2003, background): “In contrast, during 1987–93 the number of people living on less than $1 a day stayed roughly constant, at around 1.2 billion.”
Globalization and Inequality (2008, background): “over time (Wade, 2004) whereas others adamantly”
Research, knowledge, and the art of ‘paradigm maintenance’: the World Bank's Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC) (2006, methodology): “There has been widespread external criticism of Dollar’s methodology by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik (2001), economist Mark Weisbrot (2002), LSE’s Robert Wade (2004), Cornell professor (and former Bank professional) Ravi Kanbur (2001a,b), and others (including the present author).”