ISSN0286-312X

専修大学社会科学研究所月報

No. 518
2006. 8. 20

International Anti-Poverty Policies1
Dr David Gordon
Visiting Professor of Economics
Senshu University, Kawasaki, Japan
and
Director of the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research
University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

Introduction ································································ 2
The Idea of Ending Poverty ···················································· 2
Growth is Good for the Poor ? ·················································· 4
Are Random Numbers Good for the Poor ? ········································ 6
Faith in the Market ··························································· 7
Is Human Capital Development the answer to poverty ? ······························ 9
Minimum Social Safety Nets for the Poor ········································· 10
European Union Anti-Poverty and Social Exclusion Initiatives ························ 11
Conclusion ································································· 15
References ································································· 17
編集後記 ·································································· 211This brief article is based on a research seminar held at Senshu University in Japan on 19th June
2006 and a lecture given in Manchester on 26th February 2005. It also incorporates and updates
some material published in the Spring 2005 issue of Policy World – the Newsletter of the British
Social Policy Association.

－ 1 －Introduction
This brief article will examine the anti-poverty policies currently being advocated by the twoleading international policy making bodies – the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU).
These two organisations are pursuing very different anti-poverty policy solutions.

The EU iscommitted to eradicating poverty and increasing social inclusion using a combination of welfare statemechanisms (including progressive taxation and redistribution) and active labour market interventions,to help create jobs and improve working conditions.

By contrast, the World Bank, the leading UN

policy-making organisation with respect to anti-poverty policy, has advocated a very different set ofpolicy prescriptions based on neo-liberal economic theory.

The Idea of Ending Poverty
The idea that it is possible to end poverty is over 200 years old.

The French Enlightenment

philosopher, Marie Jean Antonine Nicolas de Caritat, Maquis de Condorcet, argued in Sketch for a
Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1794 by theGovernment of the new French Republic) that poverty was not a result of natural laws or divine will but
was caused by “the present imperfections of the social arts” (Steadman Jones, 2004). He argued thatpoverty could be ended by the universal provision of pensions, grants to the young, sickness benefits andstate education.

Similar ‘welfare state’ solutions for poverty can also be found in Thomas Paine’s

Agrarian Justice (1785) and Rights of Man (1791) which argued for progressive taxation and death
duties to fund child benefits, pensions and education.

The ending of poverty was seen as necessary to

reduce social and economic polarisation which, if allowed to persist, would undermine the stability andunity of the democratic Republic.

The possibility of ending world poverty during the 21st Century has gained increasing public
support over the past decade.

In 1985, Live Aid demonstrated the strength of public concern in the faceof an inadequate and hostile response from Margaret Thatcher’s government to poverty and starvation in
Africa. In the early 1990s, Martin Dent and Bill Peters and 40 of Martin’s students helped to found theJubilee 2000 Campaign to try to win remission of the unpayable debts of the world's 50 or so
low-income countries. The idea was to revive and link the Jubilee concept - based on the old Judaic
tradition of a jubilee year every fifty years when debts were cancelled - with the celebration of the newmillennium.

From these humble academic beginnings in the Politics department of Keele University,

the campaign went on to amass 26 million supporters in 60 countries and put the issue of international－ 2 －debt firmly on the political agenda2.

In 1995, the World Social Summit in Copenhagen (followed by the 1997 launch of the United
Nations First Decade for the Eradication of Poverty) helped to raise international public awareness andlend political legitimacy and credibility to the anti-poverty campaigns of many NGOs.

There appears to be growing international support for increased aid to help achieve the Millennium
Development Goal3 targets to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.

During2005, the Make Poverty History campaign received worldwide media coverage for its demands that theG8 Summit4 should deliver a new ‘Marshall Plan’ of a doubling of aid (to £55bn a year), debt reduction
for the poorest countries and fairer international trade.

However, even if all the members of the G8 were to sign up to and deliver on a new ‘Marshall Plan’for developing countries, there would still be considerable grounds for concern that the Millennium
Development Goals would not be met.

A major problem is that the World Bank has effectively been

pursuing the same broad set of anti-poverty policies for the past 40 years – despite a long history of
failure. These policies have three main elements:•

Broad based economic growth.

•

Development of human capital through education and health interventions.

•

Minimum social safety nets for the poor.

The World Bank (1990, 2001) implements these policies by adhering to neo-liberal economic
orthodoxy which Joseph Stiglitz (1998, 2000), who used to be Chief Economist of the World Bank, has
described as:•

privatisation, which tends to raise prices for the poor;•

capital market liberalization, which can allow speculators to destabilise countries’ economies;•

market based pricing, which is a way of cutting subsidies for basic food stuffs and fuel and hassometimes resulted in rioting, particularly in South America, eg Bolivia, Ecuador and, recently,

See http://www.new-politics.net/publications/interviews/martin-dent
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals
4 http://www.g8.gov.uk
2
3

－ 3 －

Argentina (economists should not be provoking riots around the world);•

free trade, which sometimes helps countries’ economies but does not always help the poor.

Growth is Good for the Poor ?
The World Bank took a lot of criticism5, particularly in the run up to the year 2000, when it
produced its Decennial Report on Poverty. Just before the report was released, the Head Economist of
the Bank, David Dollar, with one of his colleagues, Aart Kraay, released a paper which purported toprove that growth was good for the poor, that the World Bank’s policies worked and were the mosteffective ones6. They looked at data over 40 years from 118 countries and published their findings in
the Journal of Economic Growth7, a prestigious peer-refereed journal. Their report shows that, asaverage income increases, so does the income of the poorest 20% of the population.

Their graph shows

virtually a 45º line - it has a slope of 1 (see Figure 1 below from Dollar and Kraay, 2002).

As average

income increases, so does the income of the poorest.

In pursuit of economic growth, the World Bank has been the main promoter of Structural
Adjustment Programmes in developing countries. These usually consist of reducing public
spending, reducing inflation, opening local markets to global competition and following other‘neo-liberal’ economic policies. These programmes were often met with antagonism in most of
the countries they were supposed to help and resulted in considerable animosity against theBank. According to Professor Else Øyen (President of the Comparative Research Programme
on Poverty) this was “partly due to the harshness of the programme implementation, the failure toobtain the promised results, and the wide spread view that the Bank was on the side of the
non-poor, not the poor.”
6 The World Bank published a ‘preliminary’ paper by David Dollar and Aart Kraay called ‘Growth is Goodfor the Poor’. This paper, marked ‘Preliminary and Incomplete’, was widely distributed and given ahuge fanfare of publicity. For example, The Financial Times said that the paper "provides what
appears to be incontestable evidence" that sustained growth raises the real incomes of the poor and thatgrowth is "helped along by just the policies many of the demonstrators oppose: by macro-economic
stability and openness to trade". Even The Guardian joined in. Mark Atkinson wrote on the economic
pages that the report illustrated "the harm that would be inflicted on the poor if governments were tolisten too hard to the protesters at Seattle and retreat from open markets". (for the preliminary paper go to
http://www.worldbank.org/research/growth/pdfiles/growthgoodforpoor.pdf).
7 A modified version of the original ‘Growth is good for the poor’ paper was eventually published
two years later; Dollar, D. and Kraay, A. (2002) Growth is good for the poor. Journal of Economic
Growth, 7, 195-225.
5

－ 4 －

Figure 1:

Growth is Good for the Poor?

In social science, if you get a very high correlation and a 45º line, you have either discovered a newlaw of nature or you have made some sort of statistical error. Dollar and Kraay concluded from theiranalyses the following:

In a large sample of countries spanning the past four decades, average incomes of the poorest
fifth of a country on average rise and fall at the same rate as average incomes. This relationshipholds across regions and income levels and in normal times as well as during crises.

This supports

the view that a basic policy package of private property rights, fiscal discipline, macroeconomic
stability and openness to trade on average increases the income of the poor to the same extent that it
increases the income of the other households in society.

On the other hand, we find little evidence

that formal democratic institutions or a large degree of government spending on social services
systematically affect incomes of the poor.

Basically, what they argued was that the World Bank’s policy on broad-based economic growth wascorrect.

As the economy grew, average incomes would rise - it didn’t matter whether you lived in arich or poor country or if there were good times or bad, crises or not, the incomes of the poor would also
－ 5 －

go up.

Government policies on social spending aimed at the poor had no effect, democracy had noeffect, neo-liberal policies which would result in economic growth were the answer8.

Are Random Numbers Good for the Poor ?
However, after the release of the World Bank draft paper, two senior researchers working for
UNICEF produced an internal UN briefing arguing that there may be fundamental statistical errors inthis analysis.

Instead of using 418 data sets collected at great expense, two sets of 418 random

numbers were generated.

There is, of course, zero correlation between these two sets of numbers(Figure 2).

Figure 2:

Random Average Income Vs Random Income Share of the Poor

If the analysis method used by Dollar & Kraay (2002) is applied to this data, it shows that,apparently, random numbers are also good for the poor (Figure 3).
8

The Guardian newspapers reported that “the… remarkable conclusions have been greeted with glee
by economic fundamentalists”. (Richard Douthwaite, Wednesday June 14, 2000 – http://www.
guardian.co.uk/guardiansociety/story/0,,331543,00.html)－ 6 －Figure 3:

Are Random Numbers Good for the Poor ?

(The same set of random numbers analysed using the methodology of Dollar & Kraay)

Head Economists at the World Bank often win the Nobel Prize - they are not stupid. How onearth could they make this kind of mistake?

Well, they were under a lot of pressure but they also are

working in a milieu in economics at present which thinks it has found a universal solution to poverty.

Faith in the Market
Some critics have argued that there is a faith in neo-liberal economics that is almost religious9.
Edward Luttwak (1999) said:“at present almost all elite Americans, with corporate chiefs and fashionable economists in thelead, are utterly convinced that they have discovered the winning formula for economic success – theonly formula – good for every country, rich or poor, good for all individuals willing and able to heed themessage, and of course, good for elite Americans.

Privatisation + Deregulation + Globalisation = Turbo – Capitalism = Prosperity”

9

For example, see Frank, T. (2001) One Market Under God: extreme capitalism, market populism
and the end of economic democracy. London, Secker & Warburg.

－ 7 －George Gilder (Ronald Reagan’s favourite economist and the man he quoted the most in his
speeches) wrote a very influential book in 1981, entitled Wealth and Poverty. He argued that spending
on poor people just made them dependent on benefits and that the problem with poverty was that theworld is plagued not so much by poverty but by a rampant “suspicion of wealth…everywhere theseideas prevail…poverty persists and spreads”.

In 1984, in The Spirit of Enterprise, he added:“It is the entrepreneurs who know the rules of the world and the laws of God”.

A recent editorial from the Economist (13/03/2004) argues exactly the same message as Gilder
made in the 1980s:“towards the end of the century, many developing countries – China and India among them –finally threw off this victim’s mantle and began to embrace wicked capitalism, both in the way they
organised their domestic economies and in their approach to international trade. All of a sudden, they
are a lot less poor, and it hasn’t cost the West a cent.”

This is, of course, nonsense. China is not a capitalist country and the five year economic plan of
the Central Committee of the Communist Party in China is not a model of neo-liberal capitalist
economics10.

Faith is a good thing in religion but in social science you have to treat it in the same way as MarkTwain advised, when he said:“your faith is what you believe, not what you know”

10Strangely enough, the Guardian (27th May 2004) reported that James Wolfensohn (President of
the World Bank), found himself in the unusual position of praising the Communist party's
five-year economic plans: "Shanghai is the obvious place to start in considering ways to reducepoverty. There is something here we need to learn about constancy and good management," hesaid, "This is not a conference for teaching the Washington consensus. The Washington
consensus has been dead for years. Today there is no consensus. We are not here to teachdoctrines but to exchange ideas."(http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1225686,00.html)－ 8 －Is Human Capital Development the answer to poverty ?
If the first plank of the World Bank’s anti-poverty policies are built on sand what about the second
plank?

This is Human Capital Development through education and health interventions andschool-based food and nutrition programmes.

Recent UNICEF and the Department for International

Development (DFID) funded research at the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research at
Bristol University has produced the first scientific estimates on the extent and nature of absolute poverty
and severe deprivation of basic human needs suffered by the world’s children11.

Over one billion

children – about half the world’s children - suffer from severe deprivations of basic human need and
30% (650 million) suffer from absolute poverty (two or more severe deprivations).

Severe shelter and severe sanitation deprivation are the problems affecting the greatest number ofchildren in the world, with about 640 million children living in dwellings with more than five people perroom or which have mud flooring.

Over half a billion children (27%) have no toilet facilities

whatsoever (see Figure 4).

Figure 4:

Percent of the world’s children severely deprived of basic human needs

See – Gordon et al (2003) for details

11

http://www.bris.ac.uk/poverty/child%20poverty.html－ 9 －This research shows that considerably more emphasis needs to be placed on improving basic
infrastructure and social services for families with children, particularly with regards to shelter,
sanitation and water in rural areas. The severe deprivations of basic human need which affect thegreatest number of children are ‘physical capital’ problems - deprivation of shelter, water and sanitation.
Fewer children suffer from deprivations of ‘human capital’ – health, education and nutrition.

However,most of the World Bank’s and bilateral donors’ anti-poverty policies are aimed at improving humancapital, particularly in urban areas.

There are very few policies at the moment which deal with the ‘physical capital’ problems andvirtually no large scale programmes to improve rural housing in developing countries. There is a realpolitical problem here - politicians are much keener to open schools and hospitals than they are to open
public toilet facilities or sewerage treatment plants or water plants or to build social housing in rural
areas, yet we know from the history of Europe - and the reduction in death rates and improvement inliving conditions - that getting these basics right - shelter, sanitation and water - are what have the big
impact on peoples’ lives. What stops children from dying prematurely are improvements to water,
sanitation and housing.

Minimum Social Safety Nets for the Poor
The World Bank’s pursuit of minimum social safety nets for the poor is based on the superficiallyattractive idea that, since ‘poor’ countries do not have sufficient resources to pay for comprehensive
welfare benefits, then minimum social safety nets will allow these limited resources to be targeted atthose most in need.

However, social policy research over the past hundred years has shown thatminimum social safety net schemes are an ineffective means for ending poverty as they are invariably
complex and costly to administer, socially divisive, stigmatising, plagued by problems of non-take up
and often result in the creation of poverty traps. Targeting by means of universal benefits and services(e.g. pensions, child benefit, student grants, etc.) is a very effective mechanism for eradicating poverty.
By contrast, ‘targeting’ by means-testing is an expensive, inefficient and ineffective method of
combating poverty.

In the 1950s, Richard Titmus argued that welfare services should not be perceived as a stigmatizing‘benefit’ the use of which involves a loss of status, dignity and/or self-respect.
－ 10 －

They should beuniversal, available and accessible to the whole population through channels that would not involve ashame, stigma or a sense of inferiority, preferably as social or welfare rights of all citizens. The
problem with minimum social safety nets and other benefits and services for the poor is that they
invariably become poor services. To maintain good services and benefits the majority need to benefit
from them otherwise they will lack political legitimacy and widespread support.

Many social scientists (and policy makers) believe that the World Bank and IMF would have hadmuch greater successes at reducing poverty if they had required that countries seeking aid complied with
the ILO’s (1952) Convention on Minimum Standards of Social Security12, which is concerned withminimum standards for the population as a whole, rather than pursuing the neo-liberal ‘Washington
consensus’ policies already described above.

European Union Anti-Poverty and Social Exclusion Initiatives
European Union anti-poverty and social inclusion policies are very different to those being pursued
by the World Bank. In 1961, the Council of Europe adopted a Social Charter which provided a
European dimension to the provisions in the United Nations International Convention on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), such as the right to social security and protection.

Although theSocial Charter was not legally binding, it did influence subsequent European Union social policies(Hantrais, 1995).

In 1974, a Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the European Community established a Social
Action Programme which stated that economic growth should not be seen as an end in itself but should
result in improvements in the quality of life of European citizens.

As part of the negotiations around the establishment of the Social Action Programme, a proposal
for an anti-poverty programme received support (Shanks, 1977) and the first of three European Union
Poverty Programmes was agreed by an unanimous vote of the Council of Ministers of the European
Community in 1975 (Council Decision 75/458/EEC). The first Poverty Programme ran from 1975-80,
the second from 1980-1989 and the third from 1990-1994.

All three poverty programmes wererelatively small scale (Kleinman, 2002). The first programme consisted of just 21 pilot and action
12

http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/cgi-lex/convde.pl ? C102

－ 11 －

projects and the second consisted of 65 action research projects and received 29 million ECUs offunding. The Poverty 3 programme received increased funding of 55 million ECUs and had a moreformal structure which included the establishment of an Observatory on National Policies to Combat
Social Exclusion (Hantrais, 1995).

The Observatory reported annually to the European Commission

and its role was to promote social policy analysis and information exchange. The Observatory adopted
a rights-based approach which defined social exclusion in terms of access and barriers to the fulfilmentof the right to employment, housing and health care (Andersen et al, 1994).

The work of the

Observatory and the Poverty 3 programme was influential in promoting the concept of social exclusion(Duffy, 1998).

In 1993, the European Commission proposed a much larger Poverty 4 programme with a total
budget of 121 million ECUs. However, the objections of a number of ‘conservative’ governments,
particularly that of the UK, resulted in the demise of the EU Poverty Programmes.

The UK

government’s position, at that time, was that poverty did not exist in the UK (or Europe?) and so there
was no need for another European Poverty Programme.

The argument that poverty no longer existed

was set out by John Moore (then UK Secretary of State for Social Security) in a speech in May 1989 at
St Stephen’s Club.

He claimed that poverty, as most people understood it, had been abolished and thatcritics of the government's policies were:“not concerned with the actual living standards of real people but with pursuing the political goalof equality ... We reject their claims about poverty in the UK, and we do so knowing that their motive is
not compassion for the less well-off, it is an attempt to discredit our real economic achievement inprotecting and improving the living standards of our people.

Their purpose in calling ‘poverty’ what isin reality simply inequality, is so they can call western material capitalism a failure. We must expose
this for what it is ... utterly false.

it is capitalism that has wiped out the stark want of Dickensian Britain.
it is capitalism that has caused the steady improvements in living standards this century.
and it is capitalism which is the only firm guarantee of still better living standards for our children andour grandchildren.”

A senior Civil Servant, the Assistant Secretary for Policy on Family Benefits and Low Incomes at－ 12 －

the UK Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), had made the same point more succinctly
when he gave evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Social Services the previous
June.

He stated: “The word poor is one the government actually disputes.” (see Gordon and Pantazis,

1997 for discussion).

Veit-Wilson (2000) argues that these objections to the existence of poverty were influential for the
adoption of the rather nebulous concept of social exclusion by European Union policy makers. He
states:“The choice of ‘social exclusion’ as the preferred term for the problem was a deliberate politicalchoice by European Union members to avoid any government having to admit to the existence of poverty(interview with European Commission official 1993).

Stripped of redundant noise, this was a choice ofpolitically acceptable terms, not between distinct concepts” (Veit-Wilson, 2000, p24)

During the discussions on the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, many EU Member States
wanted the European Community to have a greater role in social policy.

However, at that time, the UK

Government objected to any increase in Community powers in this field. Consequently, the social
provisions agreed at Maastricht did not become part of the main body of the Treaty but wereincorporated as a protocol and an annexed agreement that applied to all Member States - except the UK.

In 1997, the Labour Party won the UK General Election and Tony Blair’s new government decided
to end the British opt-out from the Agreement on Social Policy. It thus became possible to incorporate
the agreement into the main text of the Amsterdam Treaty. Articles 136 and 137 of the Amsterdam
Treaty13, effective since May 1999, have extended the European Union’s powers to combat poverty andsocial exclusion and this contributed to the launch of a European social inclusion strategy at the Lisbon
Summit of the European Council in March 2000.

The development of anti-poverty and social inclusion

strategies was formalised at the December 2000 Nice Summit of the European Council as part of theEuropean Social Agenda. The key objectives are set out in four main groups of aims, which include:13: http://www.hrea.org/erc/Library/hrdocs/eu/Amsterdam-treaty.pdf－ 13 －

Facilitating participation in employment and access by all to resources, rights, goods and services
Promoting access to stable employment for all those able to work.
Preventing exclusion from work by improving employability.
Guaranteeing everyone has the resources to live with human dignity.
Implementing policies that aim to provide access for all to decent housing with adequate basic
services.
Providing access for all to appropriate healthcare.
Developing, for the benefit of those at risk of exclusion, services facilitating access to education,
justice and services (eg. culture, sport, leisure).

Preventing the risk of social exclusion
Exploiting fully the potential of ICT and ensure that no-one is excluded.
Developing policies that seek to prevent life crises that can lead to social exclusion (eg. debt,
homelessness, school exclusion).

Helping the most vulnerable
Promoting integration of those with particular integration problems (eg. people with disabilities).
Developing comprehensive actions in favour of areas of social exclusion.

Mobilising all relevant bodies
Promoting the participation of people experiencing exclusion.
Mainstreaming the fight against exclusion into overall policy.
Promoting dialogue and partnership between all relevant public and private bodies.

Given the varied legal frameworks and bureaucratic traditions of European Union countries, it wasagreed at the Lisbon European Council (March 2000) that implementation of the strategy to combat
poverty and social exclusion should operate via an “open method of coordination” (Ferrera, Matsaganis
and Sacchi, 2002).

This involves:－ 14 －

•setting objectives,•

implementing these objectives through national action plans,•

developing common quantitative and qualitative indicators,•

monitoring, evaluation and a peer review.

In January 2005, the European Union Joint Report on Social Protection and Social Inclusion14
outlined seven key policy priorities:

1.

increase labour market participation by expanding active policies and ensuring a better linkage
between social protection, education and lifelong learning;

2.

modernise social protection systems to ensure they are sustainable, adequate and accessible to
all;

3.

tackle disadvantages in education and training by investing more in human capital at all ages
and focusing particularly on the most disadvantaged groups;

4.

eliminate child poverty by guaranteeing their education, increasing the assistance given to
their families and ensuring that their rights are protected;

5.

ensure decent accommodation for vulnerable groups and develop integrated approaches totackling homelessness;

6.

improve access to quality services in the fields of health, social services, transport and the new
information and communication technologies;

7.

eliminate sex discrimination and increase the social integration of people with disabilities,
ethnic minorities and immigrants.

Conclusion
Poverty is the world's most ruthless killer and the greatest cause of suffering on earth. The 1995
World Health Organisation report argued that:“Poverty is the main reason why babies are not vaccinated, clean water and sanitation
are not provided, and curative drugs and other treatments are unavailable and why
mothers die in childbirth.
14

Poverty is the main cause of reduced life expectancy, of: http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/cha/c10622.htm－ 15 －

handicap and disability, and of starvation. Poverty is a major contributor to mental
illness, stress, suicide, family disintegration and substance abuse.”

Yet the costs of meeting the basic needs of every person in the world are relatively small comparedwith the vast wealth available. The practical policies and institutional mechanisms needed to end
world poverty are well known and widely understood. No scientific breakthroughs are required toprovide everybody with a safe water supply, a nutritious diet, adequate housing and basic health care.
No new knowledge is needed to provide all children with an education.

A wide range ofcomprehensive welfare state models in European countries have been proven to be effective mechanism
for delivering social security and welfare (Gordon and Townsend, 2000).

Unfortunately, the World Bank has been pursuing the same basic set of anti-poverty policies andpractices for over 40 years. These policies have proved to be an ineffective and inefficient mechanism
for reducing world poverty – there are more poor people living in the 21st Century than there were in the20th Century. This increase in global poverty is partly a result of rapid global population growth sincethe 1950’s – there are more people and thus more poor people.

However population increases are not the cause of the increase in global poverty since economic
growth has outstripped population growth for the past 50 years.

The World is much richer today, interms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person, than it was at any time in the past.

However, thiseconomic growth has often not benefited poor people in many developing countries, it is mainly people
in the ‘rich’ countries or the elites and sometimes the middle classes in ‘poor’ countries who havebenefited.

The anti-poverty policies being pursued by the European Union are very different from thoseadvocated by the World Bank. These EU policies include a substantial element of redistribution ofincome and wealth via welfare state mechanisms and active labour market interventions.

These

redistributive policies combined with investments in basic public infrastructure and job creation
programmes are known to be effective mechanisms for alleviating poverty and social exclusion.

There

is a growing evidence base on which anti-poverty policies are effective and cost efficient (see Townsend
and Gordon, 2002). These are:－ 16 －

Progressive tax and income policies with income redistribution from ‘rich’ to ‘poor’ and frommen to women.

As well as redistribution of income across an individual’s life span by taxing andreducing income levels in middle age balanced with then paying social benefits to increase income
during childhood and old age

Active labour market interventions to create high quality jobs.

Enforcement of minimum

standards on wages and working conditions of the low paid within an international framework.

Universal social insurance and public social services - the ‘basic needs services’. Introductionof internationally agreed minimum levels of benefit – such as in International Labour Convention No.
102 concerning Minimum Standards of Social Security

Greater accountability and increased social and democratic control over trans-national
corporations and international agencies, to remedy the ‘democratic deficit’.

The eradication of poverty during the 21st Century will require the pursuit of these and similar
policies. The ‘Washington Consensus’ policies advocated by the World Bank during the 20th century
have not worked and need to be abandoned.

References
Andersen, J., Bruto da Costa, A., Chigot, C., Duffy, K., Mancho, S. and Mernagh, M. (1994) The
contribution of Poverty 3 to the understanding of poverty, exclusion and integration In Poverty 3:
The Lessons of the Poverty 3 Programme, European Economic Interest Group, Animation andResearch, Lille.
Council Decision 75/458/EEC of 22nd July 1975 - Concerning a programme of pilot schemes andstudies to combat poverty . 75/458/EEC of 22nd July 1995 (OLJ 99/3430.7.75.)
Dollar, D. and Kraay, A. (2002) Growth is good for the poor. Journal of Economic Growth, 7, 195-225.
Duffy, K. (1998) Combating Social Exclusion and Poverty: Social Integration in the European Union. In
Oppenheim, C. (ed) An Inclusive Society – Strategies for Tackling Poverty, London, IPPR.
Ferrera, M., Matsaganis, M. and Sacchi, S. (2002) Open coordination against poverty: the new EU‘social inclusion process’. Journal of European Social Policy Vol 12 (3): 227–239－ 17 －

Gordon, D. and Pantazis, C. (Eds) (1997) Breadline Britain in the 1990s. Aldershot, Ashgate.
Gordon, D. and Townsend, P. (Eds) (2000)

Breadline Europe: The measurement ofpoverty. Bristol,

Policy Press
Gordon, D., Nandy, S., Pantazis, C., Pemberton, S. and Townsend, P. (2003) Child Poverty in theDeveloping World, Policy Press: Bristol.
Hantrais, L.(1995) Social Policy in the European Union. New York, St Martins Press.
Kleinman, M. (2002) A European Welfare State? European Union Social Policy in Context. Basingstoke,
Palgrave.
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Shanks, M. (1977) European Social Policy, Today and Tomorrow. Oxford, Pergamon.
Steadman Jones, G. (2004) An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate, Profile Books Ltd
Stiglitz, J. (1998) More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Towards a Post-Washington Consensus.
WIDER Annual Lecture 2. United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics
Research (WIDER), Helsinki. (Download free from http://www.wider.unu.edu/events/annuel1998.pdf)
Stiglitz, J. (2000) What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis, New Republic, 17, April 2000.
www.tnr.com/041700/stiglitz041700.html
Townsend, P. and Gordon, D. (Eds) (2002) World Poverty: New Policies to Defeat an Old Enemy.
Bristol. Policy Press.
Veit-Wilson, J. (2000) States of Welfare: A Conceptual Challenge. Social Policy & Administration
34:1-25.
World Bank (1990) World Development Report 1990: Poverty, World Bank, Washington D.C.
World Bank (2001), World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty. OUP, New York andOxford.
WHO (1995) The World Health Report 1995: Bridging the Gaps. World Health Organisation, Geneva.

－ 18 －

社会科学研究所

定例研究会

日

時

：2006 年 7 月 8 日（土）13:30～16:30

場

所：専修大学神田校舎１号館 301 教室

報告要旨

全体テーマ：「憲法改正国民投票法案の検討」
報告者

：飯島

滋明（専修大学法学部非常勤講師）「与党案について」
内藤光博（所員・専修大学法学部教授）「民主党案について」
司

会

：古川

純（所員・専修大学法学部教授）

共催：けんぽう市民フォーラム

2006 年 5 月 26 日に、与党（自民・公明）と民主党により、それぞれ衆議院に提出された「憲法改正国民投票法案」について、シンポジウムの形で定例研究会が開催された。
第１報告者である飯島滋明氏は、総論として、国民投票のプレシビット性の危険性に言及し、実際の国民意志とは異なるのに、あたかも国民が決定したかのような結果を生み出す危険性、反民主主義的な政治運営をもたらす危険性を指摘した。次に、「与党案」と「民主党案」の比較を行ったうえで、国民投票法の制定の真の意図は、海外で戦争のできる国
家にし、国民や地方公共団体を法的に国家＝中央政府の法的拘束のもとに置くことのできる体制（＝国家総動員体制）を確立できるような憲法に改悪するための外堀を埋める行為であること、「国民投票の過半数」を「有効投票数の過半数」とすることで、国民意思の歪曲をもたらすこと、投票方式としての「関連事項区分方式」は新たな「一括投票方式」
であること、国民投票運動の規制の問題性、「組織的多数人買収罪」（109 条）の不明確性、「国民投票広報」（14 条 1 項）の問題点などを指摘した。
第 2 報告者では、「民主党案について」、第 1 に、国政問題国民投票制度を含む民主党案
について、プレビシットの可能性を指摘した上で、「関連事項区分方式」の問題点、発議から投票までの期間は短すぎる点、最低投票率制度を導入しない「国民の過半数の賛成」の基準は民意を反映できない点が指摘された。第 2 に、メディアの報道の自由化に関連して、国民投票についてのメディアの原則自由な報道とすることは、財力の多寡による言論の不公正を招くこと、政党等の放送による意見広告の無料化（公営化）について、何故に政党のみに意見広告が無料とされるのか、またその細則について所属議員「数を踏まえて」
憲法改正広報協議会がテレビ放送や新聞の意見広告の回数や時間、紙面の広さ（面積）を決定するが、これは改正反対政党に圧倒的に不利になることなどが指摘された。
文責：専修大学法学部教授－ 19 －

内藤光博

2006 年 7 月 8 日（土）定例研究会報告テーマ：

コウホート分析研究会

報告者：

森

時

間：

14：00 から 17：45 まで

場

所：

神田校舎 7A

宏 研究参与ほか

報告内容概略：本研究会では 3 件の報告と討論セッションが行われた。まず早稲田大学の稲葉敏夫教授
から「社会科学研究のためのコウホート分析」と題して、コウホート分析のフレームワー
クや概念の説明が行われ、文献サーヴェイに基づいて「人口・世帯別消費」や「広義の年齢要因を補正した時代効果の意味内容」などについて研究成果が発表された。稲葉教授の発表に対し元西友フーズ社長の蜂巣賢一氏が自身の経験などを交えながら、コメントした。
次いで、中央農業総合研究センターマーケティング研究グループの石橋喜美子氏により「生鮮魚介の家庭内消費量の変化について」と題し、家計調査の個票分析に基づいた発表が行われた。また、本研究所の森宏研究参与により、石橋氏の発表に補足する形でコウホート分析を用いた報告がなされた。石橋氏および森参与の発表については埼玉大学名誉教授の秋谷重男氏より長きに渡る自身の研究を交えながらコメントがなされた。
最後に駒澤大学の田中正光講師によって「コウホート分析による果物消費の予測」が発表され、2015 年および 2025 年の消費予測をした。これに対し、農林水産省果樹花き課の西嶋英樹課長補佐が行政の担当者の立場からコメントされた。
小休止をはさみ、京都大学大学院農学研究科の小田滋晃教授の司会によって討論セッ
ションが行われた。
記：専修大学経営学部・佐藤康一郎－ 20 －

〈編集後記〉2006 年度前期に経済学部客員教授として専修大学で教鞭をとられたデヴィッド・ゴードン先生の論文です。6 月に行われた定例研究会での発表の内容が、コンパクトにまとまっています。
ゴードンさんは現在、英国貧困研究の泰斗ピーター・タウンゼントの名を冠したブリストル大学の「タウンゼント国際貧困研究所」で所長を務められており、本論文は同研究所における研究のエッセンスを知る上で有益です。
なかでも興味深いのは、「経済成長と貧困削減の正の相関関係」を立証したとする世界銀行のエコノミストたちの分析を批判しているくだりです。周知のように日本でも昨今、成長と格差の問題が新たな論議をよんでいますが、統計データをどう使うか・どう読むかに関し、社会科学に共通する面白さと難しさについて改めて考えさせられた次第です。
海外交流協定校からの客員の先生方には、学生への教育を第一義的にお願いしているわけですが、今回社研という場をつうじて、教員が研究上のお話を伺う機会ももてたことは有意義だっ
たと思います。お忙しいなか報告・寄稿して下さったゴードンさんに改めて感謝申し上げます。
（永島

神奈川県川崎市多摩区東三田２丁目１番１号

電話(044)911-1089

専 修 大 学 社 会 科 学 研 究 所
（発行者）
製

作

柴

田

弘

捷

佐藤印刷株式会社

東京都渋谷区神宮前 2-10-2

電話－ 21 －(03)3404-2561

剛）