Privatizing Poverty Series Part 9: The cult of the entrepreneur

The prioritization of innovation, productivity, and growth over income and wealth distribution; technology as savior; government as a partner rather than a regulator of the private sector; market-based solutions to social and economic problems; and the overall emphasis on the individual initiative over collective action––this economic vision did not come from the political right as…

Privatizing Poverty Series Part 8: New Democrats

Left-leaning neo-liberals rose to power just as new ideas about economic development and poverty reduction emerged. Old-style New Deal democrats lost to Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. New-left politicians were first elected in the 1974 Democratic wave after the Watergate scandal. Their main base was the white suburban middle class, and they won with…

Privatizing Poverty Part 4: Right-leaning neo-liberalism’s obsession with property rights runs through slavery

The third post in this blog series discussed how right-leaning neo-liberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism, places property rights above all other rights. This means that property holders are a protected class, overriding the political and civil rights of everyone else. It is highly anti-democratic. Right-leaning neo-liberalism’s obsession with property rights over all others appears…

Privatizing Poverty Part 2: Market-based development vs structural adjustment―same same, but different

Some comments on the first post in this blog series linked market-based development to the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) pursued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. It’s a tempting analogy, especially since both economic approaches have been labeled “neo-liberal”. In fact, these two concepts have very different intellectual histories as well as…

Privatizing Poverty Part 1: Marking a half-century of market-led development

The year 2022 marks an important anniversary in the field of economic development and poverty reduction. It was exactly 50 years ago that the shift from top-down industrial development to direct targeting of the poor began. The first salvo was launched by the International Labor Organization (ILO), whose April 1972 study of the persistent lack…

Entrepreneurship and “magical thinking” about poverty reduction

Two economists who have spent their careers focused on understanding and fighting poverty, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, recently published an excerpt from their book Good Economics for Hard Times in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “How Poverty Ends: The Many Paths to Progress—and Why They Might Not Continue”. In it, they argue that no one…

Understanding the Factors Behind Successful Women’s Entrepreneurship

As discussed in previous posts, most people engaged in farms and livelihood activities view them as a way to get by rather than get ahead. Lacking scale, they are inefficient. Lacking access to information and markets, they do not have the power to extract profit from market transactions. They pay more for their inputs (including…

Completing the Kayin Project

Monday will be the culmination of a development project in Kayin State, Myanmar. A conference will showcase the results of the three-year project – a registered cooperative with savings and lending service as well as an e-money service, and an enterprise and agri-business enhancement component for the borrowing members. In 2014, the project started six…

Notes on the QSEM

The Qualitative Social and Economic Monitoring (QSEM) is a study conducted annually by Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund (LIFT), a multi-donor platform, to look at the changes resulting from the development interventions in various parts of Myanmar. The Round 4 of the QSEM conducted from March to May 2014 involving 1,474 respondents was recently…