2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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Poverty's outer face
How poor is poor? Yasmine El-Rashidi discovers that poverty is actually a relative state
Poverty in Egypt has a striking outer face. It is not like the poverty that you find elsewhere in the world. Take New York City, for example. The two cities are similar in many ways. They are busy, they are noisy, and they are suffocated: by buildings, people, cars, and noise.
Seeking a livelihood photo: Khaled El-Fiqi
The real difference between these two great cities is the poor. Poverty jumps out loud to a tourist in New York. It is the homeless -- who are, it seems, on every other street corner and the next. They are the minority amidst the marching masses that make the city's pounding beat, but their presence is unintentionally striking to the eye.
Cairo's less-privileged stand out in a different way. They are more. Many more. They are, in short, the masses. But the masses make up the norm, and the norm blends in, and poverty, in essence, becomes a relative state.
Compared with the United Kingdom or the United States, foreigners agree, poverty is much more widely-felt, and widespread. It has no boundaries, and it is everywhere.
"You can't get away from it," one foreign resident says.
Escapism is a convenient thing for those not afflicted. Reality hits hard, however, for the minorities, or majorities, that make up poverty-stricken populations around the world. It is often not, to them, a question of whether or not they are living the norm, but rather, how to get out of this so- called "standard" state and propel themselves into the pampered handful that constitutes the privileged upper sliver of any nation's social strata.
That, fundamentally, is what the core of the daunting poverty question should be: poverty reduction, and what it really means. And while the situation in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region may in fact be the most severe, sociologists, psychologists, and economists agree that poverty feels the same wherever it may be.
"Reducing global poverty has been identified as the single greatest development challenge facing the international community," wrote Richard Adams and John Page of the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Group in their paper Holding the Line: Poverty reduction in the MENA, 1970-2000. "The International Development Goals (IDGs) -- reaffirmed in the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations -- set out the ambitious target of halving the global incidence of poverty -- measured as an income per person below $1 per day in internationally-comparable purchasing power -- by 2015. But progress in the 1990s toward achieving this goal has been disappointing. Even under the most optimistic growth scenarios, many developing economies will remain far from the Millennium Declaration goal."
"The low and middle-income countries of the MENA region," they wrote, "offer a sharp contrast to much of the developing world in terms of both the overall incidence of poverty and recent trends in poverty reduction."
What, though, does poverty reduction really mean beyond the mere bulging of one's back pocket?
"In the broadest sense," Adams, who wrote Evaluating the Process of Development in Egypt, told Al-Ahram Weekly, "the process of development involves improving the quality of human life."
This is a process supported in its essence, but one, Adams believes, that is not quite rightly understood.
"In the poorer countries of the world, development generally requires increasing incomes," Adams says. "But it also involves other things, such as raising standards of health and nutrition, improving access to education, reducing poverty and increasing the equality of resources."
Development, it appears, is a multi-layered task crowned with an angel's halo. But one, it is evident, whose theory is tough to turn into an implementable process.
"In the last decade, one of the most commonly- cited definitions of development is that contained in the Human Development Index (HDI)," Adams wrote in his paper. "As originally set forth by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the HDI declares that: Human development is a process of enlarging people's choices. In principle, these choices can be infinite and change over time. But at all levels of development, the three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living."
This is an ideal definition, specialists agree.
"The HDI represents a useful definition of development," Adams says, "because it can be defined along three clearly-defined dimensions; 'leading a long and healthy life (longevity), acquiring knowledge (educational achievement) and access to resources (income)."
Those dimensions fall into five key components, all of which development requires changes in: 1) life expectancy at birth 2) adult literacy 3) income and poverty 4) inequality 5) productivity (labour and land).
In Egypt, the scene has a long way to go, Adams found.
"When separate variables are included for urban and rural Egypt for several of the components, only two of the five measured variables -- life expectancy at birth and productivity (land) -- show rates of improvement which exceed those of their relevant benchmarks," his evaluation showed. "Life expectancy at birth in Egypt has improved at a rate faster than that of other developing countries because of substantial progress in boosting cereal (especially wheat) crop yields."
Not anything to get too excited about, one must caution, for of the five measured variables, adult literacy, income and poverty (urban and rural), inequality (urban), and productivity (labour), show rates of improvement which fall below their relevant markers.
Poverty, at the end of the day, though, is a relative state. As Adams and Page write, "If one looks at poverty using international purchasing power standards of $1 or $2 per day for six developing regions...MENA stands out as the developing region with the lowest incidence of IDG poverty ($1 per day) throughout the 1990s, at less than 2.5 per cent of the population."
Encouraging in a sense, but nothing to take for granted. The durability of MENA's success in reducing poverty during the 1990s is currently causing concern. And justified concern at that, in that it derives from three concrete indices:
"The slowdown in economic growth since the mid-1980s has meant that per capita incomes remained virtually stagnant in a number of countries, and several experienced major macro- economic shocks," the economists wrote. "The fiscal retrenchments required of the public sector in many of MENA's developing economies have limited public employment and public sector wage growth, as well as direct transfers to households, traditional mechanisms of support to the poor. Of point three, they write, "The shift from a state-led, inward-oriented model of economic development to one more dependent on external markets and the private sector has produced anecdotal evidence of, and substantial public debate over, perceived increasing inequality of incomes."
And these three points, of course, are now underscored by the recent global economic turbulence following the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September making poverty reduction progress, on any level, an arduous thing to sustain. And while the MENA region as a whole may have shown an improvement in the quality of life, in Egypt, it is unfortunate to point out that -- alongside Jordan -- overall head-count index shows poverty has increased. This is linked directly to both increasing inequality and declining expenditures.
In both 1980/81 and 1994/95, real wages in Egypt fell drastically -- in all sectors of the economy, affecting both the "free market" and the "public" sectors of the national economy. This, it appears, was the primary culprit for the increases in rural and urban poverty during those periods. While variables such as the inflow of money from Egyptians abroad, and the changing oil prices following the Gulf War, brought to the picture sporadic doses of fluctuation, it appears, for now, that we are back at square one. For even if the past ten, twenty, or even 30 years showed hints of improvement, the past seven months have laid it all to rest.
"In Egypt the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) needs to grow by an average seven per cent per year to create the type of labour-intensive economic growth that can raise incomes and reduce poverty," Adams says. "To be sure, faster economic growth is not the one and only condition required for development in Egypt. However, economic growth that provides more employment for people can -- and typically does -- spur growth in other areas, such as poverty reduction (by enabling people to work their way out of poverty), and educational achievement (by providing parents with the economic means to keep their children in school)."
The nation's GDP growth rate currently stands at an estimated 3.5 per cent per annum -- a sizeable stumble behind where it needs to be.
"The Egyptian government needs to focus on productivity," Adams says. "Especially total factor productivity, which includes all methods used to produce goods and services with factors of production (like labour and land). This will require higher levels of investment in human capital, particularly in the areas of primary and secondary education. Investment in human capital, in the sense of raising the literacy and technological skills of Egyptians, is needed to prepare Egyptian society for meeting the development challenges of the 21st century."
This is an investment that the government has slowly been working towards, but one whose infrastructure and solid foundation are not yet quite set in place. The main concern appears to be the lack of planning, lack of analysis and lack of a perspective. If the government wants to propel the people of its nation into the comfort of a quality life, it needs to start thinking big. Not in terms of money, but rather, in terms of the country's bigger picture.
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