The Role of the State and the Market in Poverty Eradication - Expert Group Meeting: Poverty Eradication

The Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD) of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in collaboration with the International Labour Organization (IL0) organized a high-level Expert Group Meeting on “Poverty Eradication” from the 20th to 22nd of June 2011, in Geneva, Switzerland, as part of the preparations for the 50th session of the Commission for Social Development (CSocD), which is scheduled to take place in New York in February 2012.

Meeting document | 13 September 2011
In this paper, we postulate through a stylized model that the essence of development lie with human capital accumulation, in particular education, both because education could provide a self-sustaining force for development, as experience from East Asia shows, and because it is essentially one of the few things which development should really be about. Poverty, in the long run, is to be tackled through education and development, although an anti-poverty program may have more immediate priorities in the short term. However, a human capital accumulation-centered development strategy could not entirely rely on the market. The state must have vision, leadership and strategic planning, as well as make other active interventions in the normal functioning of the market. The paper discusses in particular the case of the market for education, and finds ample rooms for state action in this market, if the long run aims of full and successful development and poverty eradication are to be achieved.