remains a political consensus that the right economic policies (whatever they may be) offer the best approach to tacking inequality by means of growth, there are voices suggesting that the combination of technological and global economic change make that an increasingly difficult ideal to realize in the advanced economies (see Baldwin, 2016, 2019). In that sense the reduction of inequalities between countries is seen as offering a challenge to the conventional approach to reducing inequality in individual countries. We now shift attention, therefore, to the issues about inequalities between countries.
Inevitably the emphasis in development economics has tended to be upon facilitating economic growth in the poorer countries of the world. We will not explore here the questions that can be raised about the ‘good faith’ of the exponents of this view, inasmuch as international capitalist enterprise tends to involve concern with the low cost rather than the welfare gains of its workforce (Artaraz and Hill, 2016, Chapter 3). Rather, the questions applicable to this chapter are about the notion that growth will necessarily reduce inequality. It was observed earlier that much of the recent economic growth has been in countries in the region of Asia. In contrast, most nations in the central and southern African region have seen very little.
Optimistic statements about growth in the global South are tempered by recognition that two very large nations – China and India – have done particularly well. But there is a key question about the extent to which national growth has been accompanied by increasing internal inequality. Bourguignon (2015, p. 53) observes that inequality tends to go up with market reforms in economies in ‘transition’, and that this was particularly evident in China between the 1980s and the 2000s ‘where the Gini coefficient for this period increased from 0.28 to 0.42’. Cook and Lam (2011, p. 139) report the Chinese response to the financial crisis post-2007 as involving a massive fiscal stimulus package, including ‘a range of social policy instruments, including interventions aimed at boosting consumption and protecting the vulnerable’.
With respect to the smaller countries of the global South, commentators on development (Anand et al., 2010; Surender and Walker, 2013; Bourguignon, 2015) tend to stress the need for aid policies that are linked to efforts to steer support towards less advantaged people. Much discussion of development emphasizes the need for the countries of the global South to develop governmental institutions that can support economic development with progressive social policies. The special cases of rapid modernization – particularly South Korea and Taiwan – have involved strong governmental controls (Kwon, 1997), but also exceptional support from the US. What has been widely criticized as the ‘Washington Consensus’ with respect to aid policies dominated by the notion of growth depending upon open free markets, though perhaps less influential in the 2010s (Serra and Stiglitz, 2008), has, where it has succeeded, set up a dynamic in which inegalitarian forces in the global North reinforce those in the South. The potential for the use of capital from the former and labour from the latter has threatened to generate a global ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards and social protection, a threat which has re-emerged in the years since 2008 (Milanovic, 2012; Sørensen, 2012).
There is one other route towards the reduction of inequality that must be briefly mentioned, which is the movement of people (see Chapter 6). Migration presents opportunities to reduce inequalities between countries in the global North and those in the global South, for example through remittances (see Figure 6.1), as well as the capital (economic, human and social) accrued by migrants and contributed to countries of origin via return migration. However, it also represents the opposite given the benefits to countries of migration which receive largely prime working-age, highly skilled individuals whose educational and training costs have been borne elsewhere, or particularly in the case of women migrants, where demand for their health and welfare work may contribute to the gender equalization of care work in advanced economies but leaves a care gap filled informally, and at a cost, in their countries of origin. Collier’s (2013) analysis notes that the benefits of migration offered to countries of origin depend largely upon the permanence of the move. Restrictions on permanence, such as countries of destination making specific efforts to limit migrants to ‘guest worker’ status without security and without families, may thus benefit countries of origin while creating insecurity and diswelfare for those migrating. These examples highlight the complexity of global inequalities where policy may facilitate equalization in simple economic terms but does not represent social progress.
This chapter has considered a number of dimensions of inequality that are important to the concerns of the chapters that follow. However, there are many other dimensions that have not been captured here, as well as further nuances to the debates and questions that have been discussed which add further complexity to the policy challenges arising. As a general position taken here, the conclusion is that there are broad global forces at work encouraged by capitalist perspectives on how development should occur that give little attention to social issues.
Actual policy responses depend a great deal upon decisions by actors within individual nation states. In this respect there is, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, no simple uncontestable way of explaining how social policies have grown to such levels of importance in societies today. This account has concentrated upon the consequences of capitalist economic processes for the generation of inequalities. But, in passing, it has been noted that social policy development may also be explained by concerns to limit social unrest and win support for the status quo. These themes secure more attention in the next two chapters.
It has also been observed that the egalitarian thrust of some policies has been constrained by limitations that focus upon changes within individual life cycles (the welfare state as ‘piggy bank’). Moreover, when attention turns, as it will in Part II of this book, to specific policy areas, it will also be seen that, for example, health policies may be viewed as ways of dealing with risks for individuals rather than as generically redistributive. If treated as ‘universal’ in scope they cope with unexpected problems regardless of the original economic status of patients. Similarly, education policies can be seen as driven by economic concerns, and as noted they are unlikely, on their own, to have egalitarian outcomes. Finally, environment policies address societal risks alongside individual risks, and this is particularly illustrative of the limits of international equalization across unequal nations and the peoples within them. An important feature of the development of the study of social policy since the mid-twentieth century has been a recognition of the need to limit global generalizations (generally based on the experiences of the richest economies in the global North) and to recognize variations in national responses. This is particularly manifested in the development of comparative analysis, explored further in Chapter 3.
In trying to offer an account of social policy that takes a world view rather than one centred upon one country, it is essential to make use of ideas developed in comparative studies. Even if many of the world’s smaller, poorer and less powerful countries are left out, any account organized country by country would resemble a dictionary, with brief unrelated comments on each country mentioned. Comparative studies uses typologies to explore the extent to which there are clusters of countries with commonalities, and the extent to which differences between those clusters or between individual countries within
