Poverty, Homework! EDIT: And Immigration :) +rep for those who help

[The Norseman]

Hey I have this task, any suggestions, answers, opinions etc.?

The causes of why some countries are suffering from poverty while other countries are wealthy and discuss measures to reduce worldwide poverty/poverty in single - countries.

[lolIsuck]

What do you mean, do you have some more information. Is this "Why is Europe wealthy and Africa poor?" or more specific?

[Gen. Chris]

This will degenerate to a white/European guilt thread pretty quick...

[The Norseman]

Except for Colonists in Africa, that I already know about. I am just thinking about it generally. Why are some poor and other rich even though they are similar in many ways(natural resources etc)

[Lord Baal]

Nope. I'll try to stay away from politics and center on local perspectives. A single perspective to be precise, the abundance of important resources and how are employed. If there are foreign politics involved on a country wealth (which is a fact for most cases) it's beyond what I'll point out.

There's a theory that runs under the name of The Curse Of Being Rich In Natural Resources or something along those lines. According to this, countries that have plenty valuable resources like mine (Venezuela have from oil to uranium passing by iron, aluminum, diamonds, coffee, rubber and tons of other stuff) generally don't plan ahead because their short term exports make serious amounts of money, and in fact this abundance of money allow the easy spread of corruption, which in turn generally results in governments decaying rapidly and disregarding the overall economy, which in turn can encourage the increase in poverty on the country, which could be duct-tape-fixed by trowing more of that excess money around.

This in fact is a down spiral where the whole economy depends only on this product or products, so most of the wealth is associated with it and it's industry. As a side effect other industries witter and the country depends more and more on imports, and when you import more that what you export, BANG, the whole country is in debt. Maybe this is not noticeable because the big amount of money getting in but the interests of those debs could quickly eat up a country, to the point it have to make pay arrangements and concessions to allow the exploit of its resources to other countries and when you are at that point you know you have touched bottom....

This happens a lot with a lot countries in Africa because of gold, diamonds and oil. My country for example already have a arrangement with China so they are the defacto owners of the Orinoco river for 30 years... a river not only filled with rich natural life but with tons of gold and gas deposits. We are at the bottom.

On the other side countries with no valuable resources generally need to invest well every dime or their economies suffer in the very short term, thus people feel the full effects and change the government as soon as possible. This countries generally invest very well on education, which in turn results on a better informed people with better criteria that in turn try to elect better leaders. Finland is one I can think of off the top of my head.

Of course not everything is black and withe, theres gray and blue, yellow, red and tons of colors. There are countries on both sides of the scale and many more in between in varying degrees to one side or the other. There are countries with plenty or resources but with smarter general leadership and either use the resources of others and reserve their own, like U. S. A., exploit their own resources but since are renewable they get the most of it like Norway or a combination of both.

There are other countries that have no resources or effective leadership, those that are getting nowhere slowly..

By general leadership I mean, umm.. lets remember that the president or dictator is only but the face in all but the most extremist countries, and that most countries are run by teams of hundreds of peoples in assemblies, congresses and all sort of governing bodies.

I used to believe this theory was nonsense but now that I live it, and has been living it for years now it only gets more sensible year after year.

I hope you get help out of this pal.

[trance]

Certainly you have some form of relevant literature to consult on the matter? Use it?

[Gandalf.]

Some places are not very econonpmicaly developed because of there natural resources. Others because of overcrowding ; ie: India, which is also stuck in a caste system where lower castes can't get promoted even if they are very talented at the job.
Others because there society is tribal in some areas and they don't use money, because leaders like dictators take it all. They generally tend to make short term sales and investments to make quick money, so in the long term there economy drops.

[lolIsuck]

The base of poverty was laid ages ago, western Europe distinguished itself from other regions during the Renaissance period. It has lead just about every development after that giving it a head start, places like Africa where only introduced to that in the late 19th century by the Europeans. After the decolonisation the former colonies had the problem that they had almost no industry and either had products that weren't fit for the global market (The colonizer needed it and focused on producing that good) or relying too much on one product which causes an unstable and riskful economy. Some countries like South Africa where lucky because it had something of an established industry but most countries where mainly relying on one agricultural product.

So, Western Europe got to the top through scientific progress, education and a fairly big and independent middle class that funded this. They were the leaders of development and these developments spread to parts of the world that had fallen behind or were in development. Later this also expanded to the parts that weren't seen as part of the cultivated world (through imperialism) and these countries both profited and suffered from it. It first spread to independent nations that used the technologies for themselves, the colonies however where comletely dependant from it's mother nation and the development wouldn't have taken place without the colonizer. The development was however focused on the colonizer and as we can still see it caused problems with the colonies after their independance.

So now you might think "well Europe isn't the big centre of development anymore, if they lead the developments then how did other countries/regions catch up?". Well, there is the Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_start which says that the leading countries will loose ground to growing nations because these growing nations can just start with new developments that were made by the leaders. A good example is the industry, it all started in Britain, a lot of machines where developed there and kept improving and improving them. Then Scumbag USA came a little later and saw "Hey Britain has made all these shiny machines, I'll just copy them, God bless Murnicuurr!!!", they got the newer machines rightaway while Britain had to replace the older ones with new ones first.

You might have noticed that the last decades countries in especially Asia are growing fast, this is partially caused by Japan. Japan was the first Asian country to develop a modern economy by smart politics and it could compete with European nations at the start of the 20th century. After World War II they made another explosive growth, this time causing growth in surrounding nations too (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_geese_paradigm ) and this caused a wave of development in Asia. This is also a great example of how a nation can develop a strong and competing economy starting from low industry. Because of low wage costs a lot of low-tech industry (textile mainly) was set up, from there the country developed and education and skill improved. The wage costs went up and the low-tech industry was replaced by more advanced industry and that one was replaced too over time and this way it grew, this is probably the only way to get out of the poverty and get a stable economy.
This process doesn't happen everywhere though, some countries are too instable to draw companies and before they can start building a stable economy.
Some regions don't have the infrastructure or like in Africa, there is no country like Japan that pulls the rest rest up.

The globalization process is another reason for poverty, although on first sight it looks like this is actually good for the less-developed countries but they can't compete against the massporduction of the Western countries and their support to their own products. The hypocrisy here is that the 3th world countries are not allowed to protect their markets while the EU and US still protect themselves.

I've probably missed a lot but I'm not great at making long posts, just ask if you have questions.

[The Norseman]

Wow this has been incredibly helpful! thanks!

[Lord Baal]

Happy to help pal!

[Claudius Gothicus]

Woah dude this is a pretty wide subject, I'm not going to explain all the concepts thorougly but there's some basic variables which are important to understand:

-Income distribution, Job Creation and access to public services determine if some people will or will not be poor.

-The birth of modern poverty: this is the idea of people being subject to life uncertainty, lack of perspective and unsatisfied needs. Lies in the birth of Urban Life. The connection between urban life and unemployment, uncertainty and unsatisfied needs is a direct one. Before the birth of Urban Life we can certainly talk about how crappy the lives of peasants in the agrarian areas of Late-Feudal Europe were but with their lives being simple and socially inmobile there wasn't really a sentiment of desperation except maybe during times of great upheaveal like the Black Deaeth of the late XIV century.

-Poverty is for the most part a direct consecuence of Structural Malfunction: the productive systems develops and creates more products while absorbing a smaller or bigger amount of individuals according to ever-changing technical needs. The malfunction occurs due to the fact that the educational(providing subjects with the technical knowledge to perform their tasks) and productive structures are divorced, so they tend to work autonomously. Sometimes a great technical innovation might leave a certain amount of subjects redundant and the productive system is not structured in a way that allows for them to reinsert without falling into poverty, while the educational system is not prepared to re-train them into the new job opportunities.

[spanish_emperor]

Poverty occurs because of the lack of productive efficiency available to a nation. This lack of productive efficiency is a result of many factors but all contribute to a lack of jobs which are the forms of income distribution for the majority of the population. If that nation invests in industries that can allow it to become competitive in the international markets by exporting then it accumulate wealth from its consumers, shareholders, etc and use this to grow its business providing more jobs and providing the government with a larger cash pool to tax(steal) from and then hopefully use it efficiently for public services the people require.

The cause for poverty is simply an economic problem. If we compare the USA, Britain, Germany, Japan, China, etc with undeveloped economies we can realize that all these nations became "developed" thanks to a strong manufacturing industry. Many such countries are now less dependent on manufacturing and have become service economies and are therefore dependent on their population to continue to buy in retail, spend on tourism, etc (all marks of a strong middle class). But such service economies are vulnerable to financial crisis's such as the GFC (because the majority in the middle class remain on the middle class thanks to debt...once the banks start requesting their money back the middle class vanishes)

The only method to reduce poverty is to improve the regional and local economies (avoiding service economies). Any other method is simply delusional. As some have pointed out, globalization simply allows corporations to further their market share in a nation's industry and maintain a monopoly or oligopoly resulting in less jobs (think of the jobs the competitors would be promoting) and higher prices.

[Demokritos]

Current economic policies of some rich countries may contribute in keeping poor countries economically underdevelopped. For instance, the current policies of EU to subsidize the agricultural products of their own farmers are said to make it extremely difficult for farmers in Africa to develop their agricultural industry for exports or even local markets, as they compete with the undercut prices for European goods. Don't know to what extent this is true, but I heard it in a documentary about the matter once. But if it's true, EU stopping such unfair subsidy policies would enable African farmers to compete with European colleagues on more equal terms and thereby gain market shares, increased wealth, more buying power to develop other areas in their society etc. Now, a richer Africa would also mean more trading orders being issued from this continent to EU, which would further benefit EU in wellfare, too. So the current policy of EU in this regard appears incredibly shortsighted.

[The Norseman]

Thanks again, Ill give some more rep when able! Do you have any suggestions for two countries I can compare? (Two countries which have the same resources, but entirely different in the way that one of the countries is much more rich than the other.) Besides African countries!

[Lord Baal]

Ummm I would say Venezuela and Dubai Emirate or the whole United Arab Emirates.

[Claudius Gothicus]

Thanks again, Ill give some more rep when able! Do you have any suggestions for two countries I can compare? (Two countries which have the same resources, but entirely different in the way that one of the countries is much more rich than the other.) Besides African countries!

Argentina and Australia or Chile and New Zealand.

[The Norseman]

Thanks! If you can also give me some links to negative effects of immigration that would be nice as well! I have my English exams tomorrow and thats the topic! I have only good effects atm and I need some negative ones :/

[lolIsuck]

People go where the money is, it's not really hard. In the underdeveloped countries the top layer moves to the rich countries which limits development in their own country.