Human Security Archive

Among developing countries, Brazil is increasingly seen as a model for social development. Its achievements over the past two decades are impressive. The share of the population living in extreme poverty fell from 16.4 percent in 1995 to 4.7 percent in 2009. Inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient fell more than 10 percent in the same period, to 0.53, where 0 represents perfect equality of income distribution and 1.0 perfect inequality. Growth has been an important driver for these trends, particularly because over the past decade Brazil’s growth has been distinctly pro-poor: Personal income among the poorest 10 percent […]

By most measures, the income gap between urban and rural households in China is one of the largest in the world, with urban residents’ incomes more than triple those of their rural counterparts. Not surprisingly, then, improving rural incomes has become the main target of social welfare policies in China today, though it is too early to tell whether such policies will be enough to reduce the rural-urban income gap. The new social policies have also been introduced in the context of two long-term demographic trends of great significance: China’s high-speed urbanization and the rapid aging of its population. China’s […]

India’s sheer size and poverty have meant that addressing the needs of its hundreds of millions of poor and vulnerable citizens has preoccupied Indian policymakers since independence. Unsurprisingly, the mix of strategies, the resulting policy instruments to undergird them and their relative effectiveness have been a matter of contentious debate. As with other poor developing countries, India’s efforts to improve the welfare of its vulnerable populations have, at least in principle, involved three major components. The first, given the abysmally low income of the average Indian household, has been to try to raise incomes through growth with the assumption that […]