Substack

Sunday, November 20, 2016

What is the most effective anti-poverty program?

Two graphs from Max Roser that convey why removing barriers to labor mobility is, by orders of magnitude, the most effective anti-poverty program.

The first graph compares the total net present value of all benefits from multi-faceted graduation programs and annual increase in wages of low-skilled labor migration to the US.
The second compares the relative gains from removal of barriers to trade, capital, and labor respectively. 
The case rests!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What does 'improving labour mobility' mean, in explicit empirical terms, in the Indian context ?

Suppose the poorest are resident in marginal urban slums, in isolated hamlets, or on the margins of large villages or small towns. What would it mean to make that labour more mobile ? Provide a means of relocation to newly established industrial enterprises ?

Indeed, the geographical distribution of the poor and poverty would seem to be a systematically non-addressed but critical problem in the Indian context. Where, in the kind of human settlements we have in India (small villages, large villages, metropolises, rural pockets within metropolises like Delhi) do the poor reside and what do they subsist on ?

Has there been any work on this ?