By Patrick Bond –
“South Africa is achieving a sizable reduction in poverty and inequality through its fiscal tools.” This was the claim by the World Bank’s Pretoria-based country director, Asad Alam, last week, in the study Fiscal Policy and Redistribution in an Unequal Society (Three million lifted out of poverty).
To reach this conclusion, Alam and his staff simply ignored data they cannot process: numbers inconsistent with World Bank dogma. (A “fiscal tool” is, in straight talk, what the treasury uses when collecting taxes and making payments.)
The bank suffers from a seriously bad statistical habit: poverty denialism. As Jason Hickel, of the London School of Economics, pointed out recently, rising numbers of poor people represented “a PR nightmare for the World Bank” in 2000, and, after massaging the international poverty line, “their story changed dramatically and they announced the exact opposite news: the introduction of free-market policies had actually reduced the number of impoverished people by 400-million between 1981 and 2001”.
Read full article here
