Ending Global Poverty: Why wait until 2030?

LECTURE by Andy Sumner (King's College, London), organised by CROP/UiB Global.

​The United Nations aims to achieve a world free from poverty by 2030. New research finds that this could be achieved much sooner because the causes of poverty are changing.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, in his famous study of famines, found that people tend to starve because they lack entitlements to available food, not as a result of literal food shortages. Is this also the case for much of global poverty? 

Is global poverty less a question of resource scarcity and more a question of who is seen as having entitlement to the growing public and private resources? Could global poverty be ended much sooner?

Andy Sumner is a Reader in International Development at King's College, London. He holds associate positions at University of Oxford, the UNU-WIDER, Helsinki and the Center for Global Development, Washington, DC.

He is the author of Global Poverty: Deprivation, Distribution, and Development Since the Cold War. Foreign Policy has listed him one of the 'Top 100 Global Thinkers'.

This also marks UiB's celebration of UN's International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

All are welcome!