Our trilogy of Empowerment, Security and Opportunity provides a framework and an optic through which to assess comprehensive strategies for development, as well as highlighting factors which have not received sufficient emphasis in strategy formulation so far. For example, we reject the dichotomy between growth and distribution. The analysis and experience of the last decade has confirmed that the two are intimately related. We fully agree that without sustainable economic growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction. The real questions concern how this growth is to be generated, and how to ensure that the poor participate in this growth.
Large inequalities curtail the poverty reducing impact of economic growth.
And evidence has been accumulating that economic and social inequalities in turn can adversely affect the prospects for growth. We also reject the state versus market dichotomy which has bedeviled some of the discussion. There can be no question that the total central planning experiment of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe failed. At the same time, the results of the rush to liberalization in these economies has shown that a market economy needs institutions of the state to operate efficiently and equitably. As the voices of the poor make clear, at the ground level the grand ideological debates do not make sense.