“In middle-income countries, it may be that growth has lifted all the poor out of poverty who can be lifted; for the rest, social policy will be needed (Raj M. Desai 2015).” Thinking about approaches towards the goal of poverty elimination by 2030, this may be a sentence that we can cite to convince people who believe economic policies alone are enough. Here is some summary of my weekend readings as follows.

In The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty, Desai wrote one chapter ‘Social Policy and the Elimination of Extreme Poverty’. He emphasises that social policy will play an essential role to end poverty, and political economy of social policy will be a key in developing countries.

Between 1990 and 2010, developing countries halved poverty headcounts to 22 percent, mostly thanks to improvements of labour-based income. However, this may not be the case for the next decades. According to evidence, the labour income effect on consumption diminishes in middle-income countries because the poorest people remain vulnerable.

Even so, he argues that the elimination of extreme poverty is technically possible with a combination of adequate social policies, but political economy will be a critical issue. Social protection systems with strict targeting mechanisms cannot gain critical support from nonpoor populations. It leads to the slow expansion of social protection. Instead, a comprehensive universal social protection system will most likely be sustainable with nonpoor supporters.

Desai concluded the chapter by addressing three points regarding the role of social protection in eliminating extreme poverty.

Inclusive Growth: A good mix of income growth and inequality reduction has an effect to reduce extreme poverty. Some literatures show increases in labour income are responsible for poverty reduction to 15 percent. Beyond this, social protection becomes a key player.

Institution Development: The development trajectories of institutional development for social protection were varied between welfare-state countries that industrialised before the twentieth century and low- and middle-income countries in this century even at the same level of income. The latter made a slower progress due to different conditions such as increased global competition, larger shares of workers in informal economies. It results in budget constraints and targeted programmes of social protection.

Lacking Universality: The exclusion of middle-income could lead to the political unsustainability. Historically, the group played a key role in scaling up social protection. The central obstacle is the domestic politics that affect the scale and duration of redistributive programmes because it potentially results in increasing or decreasing reputation of politicians and public officials.

Cross-class Solidarity: Towards the completion of the last mile, the social protection systems need to rebuild cross-class solidarity between the poor and the nonpoor, in order to build up well-functioning states in managing social protection. The donor community tends to prefer targeted programmes to reduce poverty. However, if the goal is to end poverty, developing countries need to have a more comprehensive system to manage risks and vulnerabilities.

Author: Ippei Tsuruga Ippei Tsuruga is the Editor-in-Chief and the founder of The Povertist. He has extensive experience and knowledge in poverty and social protection in Asia and Africa.

At the United Nations General Assembly in this month, representatives will adopt a new sustainable development goals (SDGs), consisting of 17 goals and 169 targets. It illustrates a road towards 2030. One single message word would be no one should be left behind. Another key word is environment. Though there is a general agreement to work on poverty eradication and environmental friendly development, it has not been identified how to implement.

On September 2, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) organised a panel discussion ‘Road to New York: Keeping the SDGs’ Agenda in Focus’ to discuss how the development community should be engaged in SDGs. Here is my brief memo for what panellists argued.

At the end of panel discussion, Nabeeha Kazi, Humanitas Global Development, the moderator, asked each panellist, ‘what to take to New York’ as important agenda. The answers were ‘poverty eradication’, ‘implementation’, and ‘data’.

Francisco Ferreira, World Bank

• The World Bank will aim at twin goals of reducing extreme poverty to 3 percent, and promoting shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent. We are pleased to see SGDs include an inequality goal. With the goal, we cannot simply target absolute poverty through growth but also need to focus on distribution.
• There is an agreement of importance of multidimensional poverty. But there is no agreement on what indicators or dimensions to be included. Income poverty targets may be achievable but what of other dimensions? Inequality will be another problem. Reducing poverty is no longer enough.

Homi Kharas, Brookings Institution

• Hunger, food security and nutrition will be an important area to work on (Goal 2). A challenge is how to measure or what indicators to measure achievements. It is estimated that the number of malnourished children will possibly decrease from 12 percent to 7 percent with a business-as-usual model. However, it will be challenging to get it closer to zero.
• Public investment in nutrition is extremely limited. Nutrition budget is about $205 per capita in developing countries. Of which $180 come from their self-financing, while ODA and FDI contribute to very few proportion.
• Data collection and analysis are multi-stakeholder’s tasks. Data does not necessarily come from a national statistical office. Thanks to technology, we can think about methods to collect data from individuals, remote sensing etc.

Claudia Ringler, IFPRI

• All goals and targets related to agriculture production and environment system will be important. It is good that SDGs put goals and targets on developed countries as well, for climate change related issues.

Andrew Steer, World Resources Institute

• Monitoring is important. In order to measure the achievement of each goal, we need to think how to monitor. Monitoring means how to count and scale. For example, how can we monitor deforestation?
• To eradicate hunger, we need to deal with food loss and waste. Again, how can we measure? Thanks to technology, data collection has been improved.

Shenggen Fan, IFPRI

• Food security and nutrition are our focus (Goal 2). Since April 2013, those issues are under serious consideration. To work on, we need data. To achieve this goal, a role of research community is vital.
• Eradication of malnourishment or hunger can be achieved by 2030. Malnutrition and child stunting will be a critical challenge. By 2025, it is estimated that there will be still 40 percent of children suffering from malnutrition. Good news is there are some cases that show a significant achievement within a short period of time. Thailand has reduced child stunting from 30 percent to 7 percent for 20 years. Vietnam, Bangladesh and Ethiopia also made great progress.
• A key of success is to take combined approaches across health, social protection, direct intervention of nutrition, community works and so on.