Listening to the poor explain what poverty is like in their own words is more vivid than reading descriptions of it. Listen to some of the voices of the poor about the experience of poverty in Box 1.1.1 From these, together with the voices of the poor recorded in Box 5.1 and Box 8.1, it is clear that what people living in poverty need and want extend beyond increased income to health, education, and—especially for women—empowerment. These correspond to enhanced capabilities and to the achievement of the Millennium Development
Goals, both of which are introduced later in this chapter.
This first fleeting glimpse at life in different parts of our planet is sufficient to raise various questions. Why does affluence coexist with dire poverty not only on different continents but also within the same country or even the same city? Can traditional, low-productivity, subsistence societies be transformed into modern, high-productivity, high-income nations? To what extent are the development aspirations of poor nations helped or hindered by the economic activities of rich nations? By what process and under what conditions do rural subsistence farmers in the remote regions of Nigeria, Brazil, or the Philippines evolve into successful commercial farmers? These and many other questions concerning international and national differences in standards of living, in areas including health and nutrition, education, employment, environmental sustainability, population growth, and life expectancies, might be posed on the basis of even this very superficial look at life around the world.
This book is designed to help students obtain a better understanding of the major problems and prospects for economic development by focusing specifically on the plight of the half or more of the world’s population for whom low levels of living are a fact of life. However, as we