By Cristovam Buarque
Recently, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) held a meeting in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss the importance of Income-Transfer Policies – initiated in 1995 in Brasília with the Bolsa-Escola and transformed into the Bolsa Família in 2004 – in the reduction of world poverty.
Participating in the meeting were UNDP representatives from 56 countries. During this meeting, former New Zealand Prime Minister and current UNDP Administrator Helen Clark said something surprising: “Africa is a rich continent.” Although surprising, this statement is correct since it affirms that a people’s wealth lies in its population.
For Ms. Clark, the challenge of abolishing poverty involves a mobilization of the population to produce the goods needed by the poor. Income transfer is the road for this mobilization so that the poor come together to produce that which they need, thus creating the surplus that traditionally characterizes wealth.
Called “Productive Post-Keynesianism,” this logic’s best-known instrument is the Bolsa-Escola, the program through which a mother receives payment for participating in her children’s production of education.
When poverty is treated as if it were a lack of income, the poor population is seen as reducing per-capita income and not as inducing production. With her observation, Ms. Clark presented a new vision: first, because, if the poor person is producing, he or she has become wealth; second, because she affirmed that poverty is not a question of income, but, rather, of the offer of goods and services.
In the traditional Keynesianism of the rich countries, the government transfers income to the unemployed population merely to create demand and, therefore, dynamize the economy, with no need for producing the public goods needed by the population. On the other hand, Conditional Income Transfers generate a product that increases the offer of the goods and services the poor need. These programs transform an idle workforce into an active one; they increase the offer and transform necessity into demand.
Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome LinJerome@cs.com
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