The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time is a 2005 book
by American economist Jeffrey Sachs. It was a New York Times bestseller.
In
the book, Sachs argues that extreme poverty—defined by the World Bank
as incomes of less than one dollar per day—can be eliminated globally by
the year 2025, through carefully planned development aid. He presents
the problem as an inability of very poor countries to reach the "bottom
rung" of the ladder of economic development; once the bottom rung is
reached, a country can pull itself up into the global market economy,
and the need for outside aid will be greatly diminished or eliminated.
In
order to address and remedy the specific economic stumbling blocks of
various countries, Sachs espouses the use of what he terms "clinical
economics", by analogy to medicine. Sachs explains that countries, like
patients, are complex systems, requiring differential diagnosis, an
understanding of context, monitoring and evaluation, and professional
standards of ethics. Clinical economics requires a methodic analysis and
"differential diagnosis" of a country's economic problems, followed by a
specifically tailored prescription. Many factors can affect a country's
ability to enter the world market, including government corruption;
legal and social disparities based on gender, ethnicity, or caste;
diseases such as AIDS and malaria; lack of infrastructure (including
transportation, communications, health, and trade), unstable political
landscapes; protectionism; and geographic barriers. Sachs discusses each
factor, and its potential remedies, in turn.
In order to
illustrate the use of clinical economics, Sachs presents case studies on
Bolivia, Poland, and Russia, and discusses the solutions he presented
to those countries, and their effects. The book also discusses the
economies of Malawi, India, China, and Bangladesh as representative of
various stages of economic development.
Sachs places a great deal
of emphasis on the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
as a first step towards eliminating extreme poverty, which affected
approximately 1.1 billion people worldwide at the time of publication.
Sachs headed the United Nations Millennium Project, which worked from
2002 to 2005 to establish the organizational means to achieve the MDGs.
He
also offers some specific, immediate solutions, such as increasing the
availability of anti-malarial bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa, and
encourages debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries. Sachs
states that in order to achieve the goal of eliminating global poverty,
clinical economics must be backed by greater funding; he argues that
development aid must be raised from $65 billion globally as of 2002 to
between $135 and $195 billion a year by 2015.
Sachs argues that
the developed world can afford to raise the poorest countries out of
extreme poverty; he agrees with the MDG's calculation that 0.7 percent
of the combined gross national product of first-world countries would be
sufficient to achieve that goal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_end_...