External Intervention on Poverty

Paper Summary:

This paper addresses the issue of how adept external interventions from first-world nations such as the United States can be in promoting economic prosperity and development and improvement of standards of living in identified poor countries, ascertained primarily as belonging to the Asian, African, and Latin American nations. The research provided analyzes how U.S. economic policies and intervention on poverty in societies of these regions are inappropriate, since poverty as a concept is highly-dependent on the culture of these societies. The writer discusses that U.S. intervention on poverty in Latin American and Asian countries initially resulted in economic prosperity, but backfired in the long-run because economic policies were simply inappropriate to the culture of countries wherein these policies were applied, resulting in their eventual economic downfall.

From the Paper:

"In Perlman's analysis of one of the external interventions applied in Latin America by the US, inappropriateness in assessing LatAm nations' poverty rate and standards of living vis-a-vis the American standards was the focus of discussion. In it, the author stressed that poverty should not be assessed based on American standards on poverty because LatAm nations have different perceptions and conceptions when it comes to determining the level of poverty of specific societies in specific kinds of cultures. One of the examples discussed is the different conception of poverty in Brazil, wherein social inequality perceptions are inconsistent across various economic classes. While there is a general belief that the gap between the rich and the poor have increased over the years, assessment of how poor the individual is are not accurately determined."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Fullerton, T. (1997). "Reforms promote progress throughout Latin America." Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, Vol. 12.
• Henderson, D. (1997). "Lessons of East Asia's Economic Growth." Orbis, Vol. 41.
• Perlman, J. (2004). "From the marginality of the 1960s to the "new poverty" of today." Latin American Research Review, Vol. 39, No. 1.

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