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There are two standard approaches to the measurement of poverty: an exclusive survey-based method, and the alternative method of using distribution from the surveys and means from the national accounts data. Over the last two decades, household surveys have shown a disturbing trend in terms of the decreasing amount of survey ‘capture’ of national accounts data. This chapter suggests a third method for measuring poverty; this method imputes the growth rate in national accounts consumption to the mean in the benchmark year 1987. The results using this method show world poverty decline to be considerably larger than that revealed by the ‘official’ World Bank exclusive survey method. This finding forms the basis of the suggestion that the world poverty line needs to be raised in order to reflect the drift from absolute to relative poverty in the developing world. The chapter also emphasizes the lack of any relationship, theoretical or empirical, between initial inequality and future trends in poverty. What matters is the inequality around the poverty line, not overall inequality.

This chapter presents a summary of the main arguments in this book. Among these is that national identity entails national responsibility. By virtue of identifying with compatriots, sharing their values, and receiving the benefits that national communities provide, we are also involved in collective responsibility for the things that nations do. This extends to include things that our ancestors have done — national responsibility includes responsibility for the national past.

This chapter discusses several bases for disaggregating global responsibility pertaining to collective state conduct, for violations of socio-economic rights, manifested as world poverty. It draws on legal doctrine and interpretive guidelines in the area of human rights. These proposals are then considered in light of what are routinely shown to be structural obstacles to the realization of socio-economic rights. The focus is on the attribution of responsibility within a global environment legally inhospitable to individualizing the human rights responsibilities of developed states due to the extent of economic interdependence, the many actors implicated, and the enduring nature of hunger and other deprivations in poor countries.

This chapter raises direct questions about alternative strategies and policies, and calls for substantial action to meet the millennium development objectives. It argues that some of the global norms, and facts and findings on poverty, have led to two incorrect conclusions: that good progress is being made in reducing world poverty; and that aggregate growth is the best way for reducing it further. The chapter questions whether $1 per day is a valid gauge for monitoring global poverty, whether poverty statistics for China are unduly biasing global poverty trends, whether much of the debate on global poverty illustrates the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, whether equity is good for the poor, and whether there is a role for social policy. It concludes that equity matters for poverty reduction, based on the argument that growth is good for the poor.

This chapter considers how world poverty might be abolished in the new millennium. Rapid technological change and globalisation have transformed the world economy at an unprecedented pace, but the benefits are being enjoyed by the rich and strong rather than the weak and poor. The process of global ‘trickle-down’ has failed to close the gap between wealthy and poor countries, while inequalities within countries also continue to widen. The chapter discusses issues relating to the meaning and measurement of poverty and shows how the 1995 World Summit on Social Development, which incorporates overall and absolute definitions of poverty as a way to bridge the ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds, has been a significant breakthrough in this context. It argues that there is an urgent need for international social policies involving investment in jobs and the reorganisation of the public and private sectors.

The idea that relationships of citizenship may extend beyond state borders even in the absence of transnational political institutions is implicit in the idea that duties of ecological citizenship are owed to those in the developing world who bear the brunt of climate change as a result of unsustainable practices in industrialized countries. It is also implicit in the contention that duties of global citizenship are owed to those who live in grinding poverty in other countries. But even if these duties are properly regarded as duties of justice, it is not clear that they can legitimately be described as duties of ecological or global citizenship. This is not simply because citizenship is about the enjoyment of rights as well as the incurring of duties. It is also because it is part of the core concept of citizenship that the duties of citizenship are special duties which fellow citizens owe to each other as part of that relationship.

The collaboration the U4 launched at Utstein covered a wide variety of development issues handled by different international institutions. This involved in the first place coordination of their positions at the World Bank and the IMF, and the UN and its funds, programmes, and agencies. The World/Bank IMF were very important both because of the size and extent of their own programmes but also for helping developing countries manage the overall poverty reduction strategies within which all bilateral aid was supposed to fit. Increasing the effectiveness of bilateral aid could only succeed if it were part of a consistent overarching multilateral effort. This chapter starts with a discussion of U4 efforts to ensure that the poverty reduction strategies developed with the help of the World Bank/IMF in connection with debt relief actually reflected developing country priorities. It then moves on to U4’s efforts to improve the effectiveness of UN programmes which tended to be characterized by fragmentation and inefficiencies. The last part addresses the problem of coherence and collaboration between the IMF and the World Bank—the international financial institutions, on the one hand, and the UN and its agencies, on the other.

This essay reviews a number of controversial aspects of group responsibility and argues that our individual responsibilities for group actions are much more extensive than we might have supposed. For instance, once one recognizes (1) the gravity of injustices currently being perpetrated by today’s most powerful governments and international organizations and (2) each individual’s accountability for her role in these group actions, it becomes apparent that we cannot adequately discharge our moral duties in an atomistic fashion. Instead, we have an obligation to vigilantly monitor any organization of which we are a part and to work aggressively to ensure that these organizations do not perpetrate injustices. And because we all participate in the global economy, each of us has a responsibility to work to reform those organizations which leave so many of the world’s population mired in poverty.