But, amid enduring poverty, rising inequality, and lackluster growth in many developing countries, the success of past anti-poverty policies and programmes appears dubious.This mixed record calls into question the efficacy of conventional poverty-reduction policies, often identified with the Washington Consensus, which transformed the discourse on poverty in the 1980's. Washington Consensus reforms - including macroeconomic stabilisation (defined as low-single-digit inflation) and market liberalisation - were supposed to reduce poverty by accelerating economic growth.
But little attention was paid to poverty's structural causes, such as inequality of assets and opportunities, or the unequal distributional consequences of growth. And, because unskilled workers tend to lose their jobs first in economic downturns, while employment generally lags behind output recovery, reduced public investment in health, education, and other social programmes ultimately increased the vulnerability of the poor.
