- Did the notions of richness and poverty change in the recent decades? Does being rich or poor today mean the same thing as it did 20 years ago? If yes, in which way, if no why?

 

- Let’s start with the quantitative dimension. In the last 20 years hundreds of millions of people have actually managed to get out of poverty. It’s about 200-300 million people in China, 20-40 million people in Brazil, and over a 100 million people in India. Secondly, because the general living standards improve almost everywhere now, especially in those countries that are growing, probably being poor there does not mean the same thing. The distance between the rich and the poor countries is shrinking. The rich countries are in an economic crisis and cannot get out of it which means that their share of the world income is decreasing I think rather rapidly. On the other hand, within the countries income inequalities have increased. 350 billionaires in the world have more wealth than the income of the half of the countries of the world. There are more people that are moving towards the middle class status. In fact in 2022 there will be more middle class people in the world than the poor people.

 

- Where does Turkey stand in this respect? Is poverty a political issue in your country?

 

- Turkey is a middle income country, it has nearly tripled its GNP during the last decade. Until 2008 the income disparities were shrinking but after the crisis they began to rise again. Turkey has poverty but this poverty is not the poverty that you find in India where there is also a substantial middle class.

As to whether it is a political issue - it is less of a political issue than it should be in my judgment. We suggest that there is enough room for mobility to take people from poverty to higher levels of income. Overall conditions have improved, health services and other have improved. Unemployment rate just a couple of weeks ago went down to the pre-crisis levels. There are plenty of problems in Turkey but Turks look up more optimistically to their future than perhaps people in other countries. At this point there is not so much discontent. This is also proven by the fact that the ruling party managed to get 50% of the votes.  However these disparities will manifest themselves politically sooner or later.

  - The world definitely became richer in the last decades, how is it possible that the gap between the rich and the poor grew as well? What can be done in order to stop it?

 

- It is a political matter. Part of the reason why the economic disparities have become scandalously bad in the course of the last thirty years was the dominance of neoliberal ideological perspective on economy  in much of the advanced world and also elsewhere. In the USA, for instance, in 1976 the top 1% of population had 7% of the income, today they have 27%. And it tells you that it is the middle class that is shrinking, that is feeling the pressure. Middle class used to include qualified workers who used to have a middle class income. They don’t have it any more. It looks like we will see the growth of the middle class in the developing countries, but in the developed world it will feel a lot of pressure. Then there are also new middle classes that are rising through the market mechanisms that are replacing the status-owning middle classes and this phenomenon is creating clashes as well. If take a look at Thailand, for example, you will see these clashes between the different parts of the middle class.

 - These and other problems will be debated in one of the sections of the Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum that you are attending this year. What are your expectations from these debates? What do you plan to say and what would you like to hear from other participants?

 

- I value this year’s Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum because it put the issue of poverty at the centre of the debates where I think it belongs. The kind of questions that you raised - how do we redefine poverty, what does it mean to be poor today, what can we do in order to fight against poverty – those are really important questions that will be on our agenda for the coming decade. I expect the Forum to come up if not with solution but certainly with the framework within which we can actually debate these matters. And that is already important enough. In the end of the day whether the fight against poverty will take place or not is a political matter. But if the politicians decide to fight against poverty, and if they are joined by the wealthy like Bill Gates who donated a part of his fortune to this cause and urged others to do the same, all of them will need clear guidelines about how to help in an efficient way, how to avoid corruption in poor countries that can take most of the donated money, etc. All this necessitates an intellectual debate, necessitates programs, institution building and I hope that Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum will contribute to this.

 

By Yulia Netesova

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