Reducing Global Poverty through Markets or Social and Economic Rights? A History of Economists’ Writings on Poverty and Markets, 1970–2000

This paper is an intellectual history of the role of markets and corporations in global poverty reduction from the 1970s until the 2000s. Since the 1990s, several global development institutions, not least the United Nations, have endorsed a policy of engaging private business in development. This recent ascendance of the idea of corporations and markets as means to fight global poverty is in striking contrast to the history of global social and economic rights. The latter can, in some respects, be seen as a history of unfulfilled dreams of the post-World War II era. Social and economic rights were part of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. Especially, the articles 22-25 stressed a broad range of social and economic rights, such as the right to decent wages and working conditions, to join labor unions, and the rights to food, clothing, housing, and medical care. This paper will examine the intellectual history of this major shift from a rights-based to a markets-based approach to poverty reduction, looking particularly upon popular economic discourse from the 1970s until the 2000s. It will examine some major contributions to development and poverty thinking, starting with Gunnar Myrdal and John Kenneth Galbraith’s works on poverty in the 1970s, and ending with the work of authors such as Jeffrey Sachs. It will contextualize this story institutionally, looking at selected poverty reduction policies in the US and the UN, thereby investigating intellectual influences from American ways of thinking about poverty on the global governance of poverty.