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THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVE
Richard A. Jolly
Two years ago questions like “what’s new and what’s different in poverty reduction?” would have brought a set of answers different from those that one would give today. Despite the Asian financial and economic crisis, positive new developments within the last two years suggest promising possibilities for poverty reduction and poverty elimination. Poverty Reduction before the Asian Financial and Economic Crisis Three new elements stand out in the approach to poverty reduction in the 1990s. First, there was a new optimism in the mid-1990s over the prospects for rapid reduction of poverty in developing countries. The Human Development Report (HDR) for 1997, which focused on poverty, amply demonstrates this. It showed that the incidence of poverty had fallen more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500 years. Indicators of human development highlighted significant advances in most countries of the world, including countries that had experienced long periods of economic difficulty. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and some 14 other countries, with a population totaling 1.5 billion people, had shown astonishing drops in poverty in less than 20 years. Ten more countries with almost another billion people reduced the proportion of their populations below the poverty line by a quarter or more. All this set the stage for optimism regarding prospects in the rest of the world, with many Asian countries leading the way. Second, there was a new commitment to reducing and eventually eliminating poverty. At the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995—the largest meeting of heads of state ever held (117 presidents, prime ministers, and ruling monarchs), with 185 national governments represented—countries for the first time made clear commitments to eradicate poverty. This they pledged to do by