How To End Global Poverty (Compilations)

“The world’s 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 – enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over”, Oxfam has revealed.

“The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,” while the income of the top 0.01 percent has experienced even more growth, a new Oxfam report said.

“Poverty in the world cannot possibly be eliminated unless the poor themselves say, we insist on justice not charity” – Clifford Cobb (from The End of Poverty, the documentary)

This was my favorite part of the documentary.



1) According to Clifford Cobb from ‘The End of Poverty’, the documentary:

Forgiving the international debts Changing the tax system: taxes to property owners, not to consumption tax or tax wages for the poor Land reform: agrarian reform End the privatization of the natural resources

If you want to see other solutions to end the global poverty, check out The End of Poverty documentary website here.

2) The primary one that I originally was by Jeffrey Sach from Columbia University and who was the pioneer of ‘the Millenium Village project’ and ‘the Millennium Development Goals’ (MDG) and worked with Kofi Anna and Ki Moon Ban of the UN.

His idealistic calculation was to raise $50-60 Billions per year to end the extreme poverty (for those who live at most $1.25 per day) by 2015. It has been a dismal failure, but he tried. MDG has largely benefited from the rapid growth of China and India, but the Sub Saharan aid didn’t seem to succeed at all.

Facts on International Aid

“At the Monterrey Financing for Development Conference in 2002, world leaders pledged “to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7%” of their national income in international aid. In today’s dollars, that would amount to almost $200 billion each year.

In 2005, total aid from the 22 richest countries to the world’s developing countries was just $106 billion—a shortfall of $119 billion dollars from the 0.7% promise. On average, the world’s richest countries provided just 0.33% of their GNP in official development assistance (ODA). The United States provided just 0.22%.”



Source: OECD/DAC Database (2006)

Source: Jeffrey Sachs’ website.

3) World Bank and UN Explore Ways to End Poverty Together

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon discuss what the two organizations and their partners must do to turn the goal of ending extreme poverty into a reality and engage global citizens.



To view the full event, please visit: http://live.worldbank.org/global-voices-poverty

4) World Bank’s input. Bono and World Bank President Talk Next Steps to End Poverty



5) Dambisa Moyo’s Dead End

She suggests about a dozen solutions, but this short interview helps.



5) Oxfam report (2013) from RT directly.

The report was published before the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, and calls on world leaders to “end extreme wealth by 2025, and reverse the rapid increase in inequality seen in the majority of countries in the last 20 years.”

Oxfam’s report argues that extreme wealth is unethical, economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive.

The report proposes a new global deal to world leaders to curb extreme poverty to 1990s levels by: – closing tax havens, yielding $189bn in additional tax revenues – reversing regressive forms of taxation – introducing a global minimum corporation tax rate – boosting wages proportional to capital returns – increasing investment in free public services

The problem is a global one, Oxfam said: “In the UK inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10 percent now take home nearly 60 percent of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth and significantly more [inequality] than at the end of apartheid.”

Source of this Oxfam report above: RT

6) USL Go Global approach

This can collaborate with the all the aforementioned proponents, but USL Go Global is based on the revolutionary effectiveness and speed on math and science education. The main idea is to utilize the importance of the human capital, especially knowledge capital in math and science. Since advancing 1 year of math (to the level of skipping 1 year around 9-10th grade level is worth 6-10% of GDP growths for at least OECD nations).

It may make each participating country advance math learning 1-2-3-4-5+ years easily; as such, the 20-30% of the surplus gains from each participating country will be used for the various global causes and one of them will be to end the extreme poverty. Even for 1 year advance in the U.S., for instance, will make the Americans gain surplus $2-3.5 Trillions per year.

At least for K7-11th grades, its effectiveness has been proved for 170-26o students last October. Based on the proofs, it may collaborate with the states, governments, UN, UNESCO, or NGOs in near future.

7) Math for the African Youth:

A trimmed down version of USL Go Global solely for the Sub Saharan youths to start the initial changes to end the extreme poverty within a year or so if the power players join in.

In the mean while, it may focus on a trimmed down version of Math for primarily focusing on the Sub Saharan youths. Since USL Go Global can handle make people learn math 10-20-30-40+ times faster at least up to high school levels and over the half of the populations are young people and the unemployment is too high due to the collective lack of education, at least up to the 7th grade level. So, Math for African Youth is super-compressed program simply focuses on the bare minimum materials sufficient for most of the 6-7th graders in Sub Saharan Africa and it will consists of only 5-10 hours of lecture materials. So, in 1-2 weeks, most students will be ready to pass the math requirements to apply for the jobs they need to avoid the extreme poverty.

This will require some significant leverages from the various global organizations, but it is so simple that I think this may work.

8) Micro financing: Microfinance and beyond





9) Gordoni summary

For the following, I entirely borrowed from a fellow named Gordoni.

Source: Here.

The scale of the problem

“The same World Bank report finds the mean income of the extreme poor is US $0.87/day. With 1.4b in poverty, this puts the amount of money needed to lift everyone out of extreme poverty at US $190b/year. For moderate poverty the mean income is US $1.21/day and lifting everyone out of moderate poverty would cost US $750b.

So the rough magnitude of the problems we face is around US $500b/year. This makes a hidden assumption that it is possible to transfer wealth to just the people below the chosen poverty level and nobody else and without any overheads in doing so. If it is hard to correctly target the poor, or the overheads of doing so are large, the costs could be significantly higher. All dollar values we have been discussing so far are at purchasing power parity.

But a dollar goes further, roughly twice as far, in the developing world as in the developed world. This means the actual US dollar amount of funding required could be less. This is important. A dollar given to aid the poor does not equal a dollar going into the pockets of the poor. It could be more or it could be less.”

” The current approaches The Hudson Institute in 2006 published the following estimates of US private sector globally focused philanthropy: US NGOs $9.7b US corporate international giving $4.9b US foundation international grants $3.4b total $18.0b Based on this, a rough estimate of global charitable giving for international development is US $50-70b/year. This is a lot, and a lot of good can be done by carefully targeted charitable giving, but the prospects of getting this up to the US $500b/year mark seem slim. Estimates of official development assistance (ODA) from governments and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank made by the OECD: ODA to Least Developed Countries (2011) US $44b Total ODA to all countries (2011) US $178b Total ODA is starting to get towards the right magnitude, but with only 25% of it going to the least developed countries, a much better targeting of poverty would appear at first glance to be warranted.” He provides 5 extra solutions to end the extreme poverty. Brainstorming solutions “If private philanthropy and ODA probably won’t get us to a solution, what will? Positive feedback Positive feedback could play a huge role in eliminating poverty by allowing smaller investments to go to scale. Microfinance is one example. Microfinance doesn’t have the same direct payoff as global health, and it has an equivocal track record, but microfinance has managed to go from nothing to serving 100 million borrowers with US $25b in loans in less than 30 years. Are there other ideas like microfinance, or possibilities for fine tuning the microfinance model to better lift people out of poverty? Taxation New forms of taxation could readily provide the funds needed to eliminate poverty. In the UK there is talk of a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions with 25% of the proceeds going to combat global poverty, and the WHO is considering a global tobacco tax, to say nothing of the wealth transfer represented by initial allocations to countries under cap and trade CO2 pollution schemes. Global GDP is estimated at US $70b, so a tax on the order of 0.7% would be sufficient to end poverty. Technology too might enable the implementation of new forms of within country taxation in the developing world, so that those living on $5/day could help those living on $1/day. Remittances Private remittances (money sent back home to the family by immigrants) were expected to total US $406b in 2012. Numerically this is of the right magnitude to solve the problem, but the money needs to be going to the poor. In addition to helping the immigrant’s family, immigration is of direct benefit to the immigrant. Migration can also contribute to trade based economic growth. Silicon Valley’s Indian population played an important role in the emergence of India’s IT industry, and a similar story can be told for the Chinese export industry. The possibilities for immigration to eliminate poverty warrant further study. Three options worthy of consideration are better targeted immigration (universities and governments implementing a preferential option for the poor when they make admission decisions), increased immigration, and a more radical opening up of borders (Nobody is Illegal, Welcome to Europe). A note of caution: according to some economists remittances are negatively correlated with country level economic growth. They say this is due to moral hazards brought about by asymmetric information, but could it not also be due to brain-drain effects, or the money flowing in when the need is greatest. In any case the goal shouldn’t be economic growth for the sake of economic growth, but improving human welfare, which migration and remittances presumably do. Economics The field of development economics is vast and distant. There must be answers to some of our questions there, but where to begin looking? If only it could be summarized by a few key bullet points? Understanding how China has managed to reduce extreme poverty from 84% to 16% from 1981 to 2005 and moderate poverty from 98% to 36% would appear key. Is it a population growth rate story? Or is it due to switching from a centrally planned to a market economy? If the later, why did poverty increase in the former Soviet Union under a similar transition? And once what happened is understood, how reproducible is the Chinese experience elsewhere? Encouragingly, the progress in China appears to have been driven primarily by policy rather than an infusion of money. Less encouragingly, one of the key policies appears to have been the de-collectivization of agricultural co-operatives, something that has limited applicability. Technology Cell phones are now ubiquitous in the developing world. What prospects do they or other technological advances hold for reducing poverty? In an increasingly information driven world, the Internet allows knowledge workers to be located anywhere, effectively doing an end run around border regimes (Samasource, Digital Divide Data). Rather than increasing the income of the poor, another option would be to reduce the amount of money the poor need to live comfortably. Genetic engineering and high yield crops might be one approach. Another is scientific advances in the treatment of the diseases of poverty (OneWorld Health).”

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© Copyright 2013 admin USL , All rights Reserved. Written For: USL1: to resolve the entire top 5 world crises (of Transition to Renewable Energy, Environment, Sovereign Debts, Population growth, and Poverty) whose total costs will be 3-8x of the current world GDP in 15-25 years using the the world´s surplus GDP induced by USL1.0 (2.5x-10x-40x in 10-20-30 yrs.) instead of collapsing with them (with the UN, gov & NGOs)