Causes of Poverty

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CAUSES OF POVERTY It has always become hard to explain what is poverty. Poverty has lots of different definitions which resulted from different understandings or perspectives of people. As Sachs (2005) indicated that during all history, famine, death from childbirth, infectious disease and countless other hazards have been an important and dangerous issues for human’s life (p:56). Unfortunately, it is estimated that poverty has killed more people than wars did. As Alan Thomas (2000) says ‘poverty is an age-old concern’, however, we cannot talk about any common or general reason of poverty (p:3). We can find many different reasons that engendering poverty and it is obvious that in every different age, the causes of poverty are changing. So, the dynamics of societies and relations are very effective factor that directly affecting poverty. This assumption seems more accurate for especially capitalist era. Naturally, there could be many different reasons of poverty between nations or within nations. However, I think capitalist production relations and the structure of global economy are the most effective factors that create poverty in all around the world. Therefore, in that essay, Firstly, I will talk about the features of global economy and its effect on both between developed and developing countries and within one country. Then, I will focus on governments’ policies and the effects of some agents of global economy especially IMF. I will try to show some specific examples about how governments and institution can affect countries economy. Lastly, I will briefly talk about the effects of geography which this is not directly related with capitalism but it can sometimes have great impact on poverty. According to Norberg (2003), since 1965, the average income of the world has doubled and wealth of poorest nations has increased more than the western countries
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