Global poverty, inequality, and aid flows: a rough guide to some simple justice
- 2008
- p.53-63.
- 15 Nov
How one measures poverty and inequality has implications for a variety of policy interventions relating to fair allocation in a number of institutional settings. The distribution of international aid is an important case in point. This essay reasserts the importance of certain old-fashioned questions relating to international aid: what is the quantum of aid available in relation to the need for it? How may patterns of allocation, at both the dispensing and receiving ends of aid, he determined so as to take account of both poverty and inter-national inequality in the distribution of incomes? Can some simple and plausible rules of allocation be devised? If so, what correspondence does reality bear to such rules? The questions are addressed with the aid of some simple analytics relating to optimal budgetary intervention i the alleviation of poverty. The ideas discussed are clarified by means of data employed in elementary empirical illustrations. - Reproduced.