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Quotation of the Day…

… is from pages 297-298 of the 2015 Fourth Edition of Douglas Irwin’s indispensable volume, Free Trade Under Fire (footnotes deleted; link added):

Time and experience demonstrated that globalization did not lead to an intensification of poverty.  Instead, expanding world trade proved to be an escalator for bringing poor people out of poverty.  Between 1990 and 2011, the portion of the world’s population living in poverty fell from 36 to 15 percent, according to the World Bank.  The International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million in 2013 from 811 in 1991.  The past two decades have seen extraordinary progress in poverty reduction in the developing world.  Who should get the credit, the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations and other international aid agencies?  Not quite.  As The Economist put it, “The MDGs may have helped marginally, by creating a yardstick for measuring progress, and by focusing minds on the evil of poverty.  Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow – and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.”

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