Saturday, January 9, 2010: 9:20 AM
Solana Room (Marriott)
This paper will explore the way that international lending organizations responded to the changing perception of Latin American poverty in the 1960s and 1970s. Through a case study of PIDER, an enormous Mexican anti-poverty program funded by the World Bank and the IDB, I will focus on the tensions within the project of reconceptualizing the relationship between poverty and development. In the late 1960s, economists and others noted with dismay that despite high rates of economic growth in “developing” countries, poverty had not been significantly alleviated. Economic growth did not automatically lead to the lessening of poverty, and there was little in the prevailing development economics to explain or solve this. Development economists thus scrambled to theorize poverty and to formulate possible solutions that could be promoted by the international community. They strove to understand poverty exclusively as a product of economic variables that would thus be susceptible to economic policy. To do so, they defined a wide range of issues, including education, nutrition, health, agronomy, and to some extent culture, as economic. There were inherent tensions here. Poverty alleviation had to occur without sacrificing the ultimate goal of promoting what were understood to be healthy economies, and debate ensued about the relationship between growth and income distribution. It proved difficult to produce a rationale for poverty alleviation that fit well within economic theory. And in practice, lenders had to work in the context of countries where the definition of poverty was often quite different, and where development and poverty policy were less focused on economics. Through the examination of the conception, promotion, and implementation of PIDER in, I will examine the ways in which the reconceptualization of poverty on the international level shaped attempts to raise the income and living conditions of rural Mexicans.