Poverty Reduction Strategies

Poverty remains one of the greatest problems of our time, causing starvation and humiliation in poor countries and contributing to problems of conflict, migration and environmental degradation effecting also richer countries. This study provides a systematical analysis of today's donor strategies for development cooperation, which unite around the goal of poverty reduction. The most recent strategies of the World Bank and the German, British and Swedish official development agencies are compared and evaluated. Their broad consensus on goals and conceptual elements is comprehensively presented. Differences in accentuations regarding beneficiaries and implementation methods are highlighted. An empirical study of the poverty focus in project evaluations of the German Financial Cooperation rounds off the analysis by exemplarily pointing at the practical implications of the new strategies.

Autorentext

The Author: Philipp Kircher studied Economic Engineering in the diploma program of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and Business Administration in the masters program of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA. During an internship at the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau he developed the initial ideas for this study. The thesis was evolved in cooperation with the Ibero-America Institute on Economic Research at the University of Göttingen. The author currently conducts research at the University of Bonn.

Inhalt

Contents: The consensus regarding poverty reduction strategies for developing countries - Differences in the accentuations of various donors - Empirical results on poverty focus in project evaluations of the German Financial Cooperation.