"Hatcher [posits that] state governments and their private industry partners are profiting from the social safety net, turning America's most vulnerable populations into sources of revenue"--

Conventional wisdom says that Europe’s crisis is a financial crisis. But is this really the case? In Industrial Poverty, economist Sven R. Larson, challenges this view and suggests instead that Europe is in a state of permanent economic decline. Using Sweden in the 1990s as an example, he shows how a welfare-state crisis combined with the wrong kind of austerity policies replaces prosperity with industrial poverty. Today, Europe is going through the same transition into industrial poverty. Tomorrow, it could be the United States, unless Congress and the President take decisive action against the runaway budget deficit.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.

Conventional wisdom says that Europe’s crisis is a financial crisis. But is this really the case? In Industrial Poverty, economist Sven R. Larson, challenges this view and suggests instead that Europe is in a state of permanent economic decline. The crisis, says Larson, is in fact a welfare-state crisis. Over decades, government has grown too big for the private sector to pay for; when the recession hit in 2008 most European economies could no longer bear the burden of the welfare state. Raging deficits, accelerating unemployment and harsh austerity policies hurled the continent into more than a regular recession. Europe is entering a new economic state: industrial poverty. Using Sweden in the 1990s as an example, Larson shows how a welfare-state crisis combined with the wrong kind of austerity policies replaces prosperity with industrial poverty. In a desperate effort to balance the budget and save the welfare state in the midst of the crisis, the Swedish government subjected the country to some of the toughest austerity measures on record. The outcome was a permanent reduction in the standard of living for Swedish families as well as the standard of government services. Today, Europe is going through the same transition into industrial poverty. Tomorrow, it could be the United States, unless Congress and the President take decisive action against the runaway budget deficit.