EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Market, Redistributive and Proto-Reform: Can Liberalization Help the Poor?

Michael Lipton

Asian Development Review (ADR), 1995, vol. 13, issue 01, 1-35

Abstract: In early modernization, reforms can remove arbitrary privilege—both freeing markets and helping the poor. Later, there is tension between redistributive and market reforms. The paper explores reform options by contrasting recent Asian experience with earlier experiences of Europe, especially Britain. The two great accelerations in world poverty reduction—Europe’s in 1750-1950, Asia’s since 1950—saw sharply increasing salience of redistributive reform. In 1950-75, such reform often proved disappointing for want of market reform; gains leaked to the rich and to bureaucrats via rent-seeking. Yet the reaction toward purely market reforms since 1980 has also disappointed many developing countries, because the decline in redistributive reforms has left many poor people without access to markets, land, or education. Market reforms often require land reform and / or “children’s reform†in order to succeed. Recent evidence confirms robust, positive relationships between reduced inequality and subsequent faster growth. In some policy areas (e.g., bequests taxation), incentives may benefit from redistributive reform.

Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0116110595000017
Open Access

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:adrxxx:v:13:y:1995:i:01:n:s0116110595000017

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0116110595000017

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Development Review (ADR) is currently edited by Tetsushi Sonobe

More articles in Asian Development Review (ADR) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:wsi:adrxxx:v:13:y:1995:i:01:n:s0116110595000017