Fernando Eguren, CEPES.
With regard to official studies on poverty, it may seem naive but I think it's worth asking what is the basic real relevance? I ask this question without implying that they have no relevance, but why are they useful? Why are they important? What do they reveal? What not to reveal? So what you can do with these studies?
Poverty is a multidimensional concept Mensi-national and complex and involves, as UNDP would "lead a long and healthy life", "access to education", "enjoy a comfortable standard of living" and other components of that life of dignity: political freedom, respect for human rights, personal safety, access to productive and gainful well, and participation in community life. Poverty, therefore, is the absence of conditions for a dignified life.
The conventional definition of poverty, which identifies it with 'low cost' trivialize this serious social problem. This conceptual simplification can be useful for governments to show successes in the field of 'costs', which is not difficult to achieve redistributive programs. Increments-tion costs is not necessarily designed to overcome of poverty, if we consider the multidimensional scale of it.
is clear that there is a connection between poverty, inequality and quality of life. Usually the condition of poverty is a result of inequality and not vice versa. Not that the difference in income creates inequalities, it is because there are inequalities in income differences.
My question then is why the official poverty studies do not include the issue of inequality. They should, since the connection is obvious. Maybe because it's obvious, in fact, not analyzed together ...
How interesting would be, for example, do some research in which surveys also include those who are not poor, with more than $ 2 a day, and so have updated information on the different income strata. Inclusion in the surveys also to middle income and high income, which would establish some kind of correlation between the evolution of poverty and wealth trends. How to evolve the richest and the poorest? What is the correlation of these developments, and how significant is it? What is the explanation for this correlation?
course! One can say: "It is better to know how many poor there are, how they are, what their characteristics where they are ", for example, have policies to alleviate poverty more focused-used, holes more efficient. But except in cases of emergency or temporary, that makes sense if policies and economic trends are directed to the maintenance and deepening of inequality. As poverty in Peru is not temporary but permanent, then it is necessary to focus on precisely how many there are and where they are poor.
Are bonanza? Indeed, the pie grows. The poor may be better off and yet at the same time, being in a more unequal society. So if we have policies that emphasize inequalities, may be the case that there is relief of poverty and deepening inequality simultaneously. These policies exist. Since the 1990 new gra-ing land reclaimed irrigation works das financing for public resources, are sold in conditions such that only large investors can access them. This will deepen inequalities in rural areas. Another example: mining companies are subordinating and displacing the rural population in a process that can be watching us as well, in some coastal valleys, by grabbing land for the expansion areas agricultural export or production in the near future, as input for biofuels.
There are processes in place, then, that tend to the deepening of inequality and thus poverty. This is why it sounds like a perverse game that, while this is happening, studies on poverty become more technically exquisite, and are designed to locate where the poor to compensate for the sar-. There is a phrase of William Nugent says, "confirms the normal redistribution of inequality." And this in Peru and becomes normal.
There is thus a series of fundamental problems in this inequality, which should be incorporated in a debate, a discussion of how to deal with poverty.
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