Poverty , Peace , and China : PKSOI and World Bank Perspectives
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Poverty , Peace , and China : PKSOI and World Bank Perspectives
Among others , India , Vietnam , Pakistan , Nigeria , Ghana , and Kenya may join China in graduating from the Bank ’ s soft-loan window during this decade . The Bank could lose half of its soft-loan clients by the end of the next decade , if positive trends continue . 5
Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries ( FCAC )
Which regions are least likely to graduate from the World Bank ’ s soft-loan window ( known as the International Development Association - IDA )? Led by China , the East Asian and Pacific region has already halved the number of their people living on less than $ 1.25 a day . In addition , the Middle East , North Africa and South Central Asia regions are on track to meet this target by 2015 , but South Asia ’ s high population growth means the number of extremely poor people there will not significantly decline . Latin America , the Caribbean , and South Central Asia are in danger of falling short of the target . Sub-Saharan Africa is still way off track and unlikely to meet its target . 6
Trends also indicate that over half of the IDA ’ s soft-loan window will be devoted to fragile or conflict-affected countries ( FCAC ) by 2025 . 7 Poor people in these countries are extremely hard to help because of criminal activity and civil strife . In particular , countries such as Chad and Haiti are likely to remain primary recipients of IDA assistance . While most of the rest of the world ’ s poor live in countries that can lift themselves out of poverty chiefly due to their improving access to foreign capital , FCACs remain a major development challenge . About 1.2 billion people are estimated to live in this group , from about 45 countries , and none of them is expected to reach any of the UN ’ s Millennium Development Goals ( MDG ) by 2015 . Insecurity , violence , exploitative elites , and weak and illegitimate institutions act as major obstacles to reducing poverty .
Indeed , if present trends continue , 52 percent of the world ’ s poor will live in FCACs by 2015 . 8 These countries host most of today ’ s conflicts , generally found in an arc of instability that stretches from Central America to Central Africa , through the Middle East , and across southwest Asia into central Asia . This arc is where peace stakeholders are challenged and where they must continue to focus their attention .
The Fund for Peace , a U . S . -based nongovernmental organization , compiles a Failed States Index ( at its eponymous web-site , FailedStatesIndex . Org ). Not surprisingly , the index tracks closely with the World Bank ’ s low-income FCAC list but has greater granularity because it breaks FCACs down into Alert , Warning , Stable and Sustainable sub-categories along with the rest of the world . For 2012 , Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are on very high alert followed by high alerts for Sudan and South Sudan , Chad , Zimbabwe , Afghanistan , Haiti , Yemen , Iraq , Central African Republic , Ivory Coast , Guinea , Pakistan , and Nigeria . 9
While some FCACs evince dim prospects , others have blazed a path out of fragility and conflict .
Following periods of conflict or severe political instability , countries such as Cambodia , Laos , Mozambique , Rwanda , Uzbekistan and Vietnam have attained growth rates averaging 4 to 7 percent per year . Their economic growth has led to significant drops in poverty . Vietnam is a case in point : it cut its poor population from 64 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2008 . Other countries facing similar challenges also recorded progress :
• Ethiopia increased access to safer water from 13 percent of the population in 1990 to 66 percent in 2010 .
• Mozambique more than tripled its primary school completion rate from 14 percent in 1999 to 46 percent in 2007 .
• Rwanda cut the prevalence of under-nutrition from 56 percent of the population in 1997 to 40 percent in 2005 .
• Nepal received the Millennium Award in 2010 for significant progress in reducing maternal mortality , falling from 770 to 170 per 100,000 live births between 1990 and 2010 . 10
These improvements , however , can be contrasted with other countries that moved out of and then back into the FCAC group due to slower economic growth and uneven reforms ( e . g ., Djibouti , Gambia and Tajikistan ). Poverty reduction in FCACs is therefore not easy and far from universal .
Breaking the Mold
Is there a vicious , self-supporting nexus between poverty and conflict in the FCACs ? 21st-century violence has , so far , broken out of the 20th-century mold predominated by interstate war . Such wars are becoming less common throughout the world . Psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that in developed countries interstate war may only get underway on “ rare occasions when it is certain to prevent even greater costs to human well-being .” If so , interstate war could be “ going the way of customs such as slavery , serfdom , breaking on the wheel , disemboweling , bearbaiting , cat-burning , heretic-burning , witch-drowning .” 11
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