Targeted Programs for the Poor during Structural Adjustment: A Summary of a Symposium on Poverty and Adjustment, April 1988

摘要

Three kinds of measures are often suggested as appropriate for helping the poor under structural adjustment: compensatory programs, preferential or graduated cuts in wages and social services, and permanent shifts in public expenditure in favor of the poor. Compensatory programs clearly pose the least political problems. They are temporary and often receive significant external support. There is an obvious social justice to weighting cuts in wages or social services to spare poorer groups. Long-term shifts in public spending that favor the poor are also politically difficult. The problem is not that pro-poor measures have no political support. Rather, it is that connections are far from automatic between political gains for the government, perceived equity, and measures that benefit some of the poor. (Copyright (c) 1988 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank.)