Can improved human development policies break the cycle of poverty?

Abstract

If development is complicated, then development cooperation is at least as complex. This chapter considers a number of lessons we have learned about development cooperation. This reflection uses the Millennium Development Goals as benchmarks since they reflect an unprecedented agreement by the development community about the aims of development cooperation (Box 1). The targets and indicators of the Millennium Development Goals range from income poverty (living on less than one dollar a day), to child mortality and primary education, to gender equality, maternal mortality and safe water and sanitation. The goals provide measures by which the development community can monitor its progress towards development in general and to the different dimensions of poverty reduction in particular. The focus here is on human development: one of the dimensions of development and a prerequisite for overall development. This world has a rich set of "social experiments" in terms of individual countries' policies on human development. These provide evidence of which policies work and which are unlikely to work. This chapter addresses the question of whether improved development policies can break the cycle of poverty. We know what good practice is. For example, money for education should reach the schools, teachers should be paid if they teach (and ghost teachers should not be paid), parents should be able to release their children from the chores of caring for the household, like carrying water or herding cattle, if this prevents the children from attending school. Why then is this level of good practice - no rocket science - not reached everywhere? The reason is because good policies need to be implemented, embedded and then safeguarded against the interests of elites to maintain the status quo. The introduction of good policies is a matter of political economy. Personally, I have advanced, time and again, the role of transparency and accountability as a mighty force behind the implementation of good policies. Show the poor that the money meant for the poor also reaches them. And - if that is not the case - give them voice in changing the situation. This simple recipe (also now advanced in the World Development Report 2004) requires a firm policy line, namely, to create and maintain transparency.2 This reasoning boils down to a general conclusion for development cooperation. Development cooperation should contribute to increase the room for developingcountry governments to manoeuvre to implement "good policies", in particular, with regard to transparency. While this chapter was written to debate the question of why poverty still endures, an alternative and less pessimistic question could be posed: "Will poverty endure?" Evidence from the past shows that persistent poverty in a country is not a fate that will forever remain unchanged. Let us briefly examine the worldwide trends in poverty in the recent past and consider the near future. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.