Volume 48, Number 9 · May 31, 2001
The Charms of Property
By Jeff Madrick
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
Hernando de Soto
Basic Books, 276 pp., $27.50
No one can tell us with any authority that money makes people happy. But we know that extreme poverty usually makes people unhappy. The World Bank calculates that the number of people in the world living in poverty increased by more than one hundred million since 1987 to approximately 1.2 billion in 1998. This is based on a low threshold of poverty, the equivalent of $1 a day. While the absolute number of poor in the developing world has risen significantly by this measure, the proportion of those in poverty in these nations fell from 28.3 percent in 1987 to 24.0 percent in 1999. Almost all the improvement in poverty rates, however, occurred in East Asia, particularly in China. If we exclude China, the proportion of the developing world living in poverty fell only from 28.5 percent in 1987 to 26.2 percent in 1998. Some progress was also made in reducing the proportion of the poor in South Asia, notably in India. But the percentage of poor people in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa rose, and there was a huge increase of nearly 25 million poor in Eastern Europe.
Review, 4352 words
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