 What really struck me in this conference was how similar certain of the issues broached and also the the tensions revealed were to debates that have taken place within the context of poverty over the last 15 years or so and So given as Winston said that most of my work focuses on poverty I'd like to use it as a lens with which to view some of the issues that have come up here and Perhaps forge some of the linkages between some of the silos that were referred to in the opening plenary so more specifically I'd like to talk about three things and They are multidisciplinary or sorry multi-dimensionality stocks and flows and Lastly the thorny issue of causation So first multi dimensionality for for a long time, you know, it's been recognized that Poverty is not simply about lack of purchasing power proxied by income or consumption and There are many many dimensions of deprivation, you know, that are widely recognized things like inadequate health education personal insecurity lack of dignity and so forth In the last 15 years or so This has really been thrust into the poverty literature and there's been a spate of work on multi-dimensional poverty indices multi-dimensional poverty analysis including a lot of work done here at wider and You know, I see this reflected in The conference where I can just go through one by one. We have separate sessions on hunger personal insecurity via conflict vulnerability education health water and gender violence and You know the elimination of all this stuff may have instrumental value in so far as it brings about other things which we deem to be worthwhile but it's also of intrinsic importance and You know, this may be just restating the obvious, but I think it's worth repeating Okay, so that was my first point with respect to multi-dimensionality Now now I'd like to say something about this distinction between stocks and flows and Within the poverty literature a core distinction of late is between the analysis of poverty status or the stocks of poverty on the one hand and analysis of poverty dynamics or the flows of poverty on the other and For me, I think it has some cutting power here because it maps quite closely on a distinction that was brought up in the plenary by Tony and Raquel and this is a distinction and I'm going to read between continuing crises of poverty hunger and disease on the one hand and Unexpected crises due to wars natural disasters Pandemic and economic shocks. So so let me just do a little unpacking here and then get to why I think this matters Okay, so the the unpacking is this You know in typically until relatively recently when we've had a lot more panel data The Typical form of poverty analysis looked at stocks of poverty So stocks of poverty at one point in time or at multiple points in time So you could say something useful say about Magnitude so poverty percentages or numbers you might be able to say something about trends characteristics and You know if you're lucky causes Okay, poverty dynamics is different. It does different things what it does is it tracks individuals or households over time So in the end you can say something about four different categories of persons Namely those who stay poor Those who exit who escape those who fall into poverty and Those who are never poor Now within this literature Emphasis tends to be placed on those who fall into poverty or who are at risk of falling into Poverty and this is the whole language of vulnerability So the under the associated concept of ill-being or deprivation changes Here we're worried about vulnerability Downside risk the likelihood of a dissent into poverty Typically the triggers of such dissents this gets us into the whole languages of shocks of hazards In in the poverty literature There are six that are deemed to be the most Important for populations in the global south and I'm just gonna read them off and you're gonna see that every single one of them Has been covered in this conference. So the six biggies are Conflict illness natural disaster harvest failure terms of trade deterioration loss of Deployment and so one by one, you know, I actually systematically did it and everything has been covered here now Whether or not these shocks actually lead to dissents to worsening of living condition depends on a number of things Depends on their severity their frequency their bunchiness if they all come right after each other It depends on exposure of populations and also depends on response So-called coping strategies strategies of adaptation Some of this falls under the heading of resilience Okay, so by and large The analysis of poverty is very different now Then it was say 20 years ago. The language has turned has changed the terms have changed The analysis has changed Okay, but so so what right? Does any of this actually? matter for any practical purposes and I think it does matter big time and I think it matters for at least two reasons and the first reason is that Like we're talking about big a big-time phenomena that the magnitude of transitory poverty Can be very very large and so if you define transitory poverty as Those who sometimes are poor and then at other times in different spells are not poor and If you look at many spells if you go from one to two to three or four You see that sometimes the transitory component of poverty is two three four five six times as large as The chronic component so there's a lot more people moving in and out than was previously thought now two caveats here, so I don't overstate this point is one this is part of this is driven by measurement error and to this doesn't necessarily generalize to all dimensions of Deprivation and I learned in the session in nutrition Yesterday that the chronic component of malnutrition is more important by a large order of magnitude than the transitory part associated with recent crises, but nevertheless transitory poverty is a very big deal Okay, and then secondly the other reason why this matters is Because the policy response can be systematically different So the kinds of things we have in mind to address long-term chronic poverty Can and are very different from the sort of things that we have in mind to force all Descents and so the latter often fall under the heading of things like Social protection measures insurance schemes diversification of sources of income at a more macro level capital controls in the context of currency crisis and things like this and you know the the Session I attended on responding to economic shocks I thought was very good in teasing out a number of these appropriate policy responses Okay, so they matter because it's a big-time phenomena and to policy responses tend to be different So let me just make three points about future challenges I you know it said to say something about future challenges So three come to mind with respect to the distinction between stocks flows Dynamics status transitory chronic and here are the three You know I've never really seen a good analysis where you've weighed both pros and cons of strategies To affect transitory versus chronic poverty and in the real world there is a finite pie So investments in one may very well be at the expense of the other So I think that's one challenge to do something like that Secondly and obviously it's the win-win stuff that of course is What everyone's looking for and the paradigm case is health a good Efficient functioning health system tends to be very good for both transitory and chronic poverty there are other things like that and Lastly, there's a there's an older literature that came up I've heard at the conference and it's another way of saying the same thing and this is a literature on linking relief and development so you know Doing things in the immediate to address You know real human suffering, but at the same time doing it with a view towards long-term Effects and given that many of the world's crises are unlikely to be of short duration You know, I think this is an important point Okay, so so much for stocks and flows let me conclude with my my third point and and this is a causation thing and You know as we all know causation is really complex and it's complex because there's a ton of things going on and they're all Going on at the same time So it's hard to know what exactly is driving what and it's in particularly hard empirically to demonstrate this and in the literature on poverty there's many many ways to try and You know make causal claims and to impose a causal structure on it But there's one distinction which once again I find useful I find it has cutting power for this conference and I found this came up like again and again and again in sessions that I attended okay, and the distinction is Is as follows and in this discussion I'm referring mainly to income poverty But you can generalize with appropriate modifications to other dimensions of deprivation, but here's the distinction so on the one hand One causal approach to poverty which is very widespread And I think it tends to be the model which underlies a lot of aid or development assistance Is the view that poverty is caused by a lack or a want of sources of income or consumption growth and The implicit idea here is that of a production function Where on the left hand side the end game is some measure of output or income and Then on the right hand side are all the determinants of this So you can have things like you know your factors of production Land labor physical capital can have human capital Technology technological change have credit and things like that and essentially poverty or low income is due to low levels of these things so in terms of poverty reduction strategies and affecting poverty reduction the key is to increase things like health or education or to invest in rural infrastructure to Think about technological change in agriculture to increase yields and that kind of stuff with a view to increase incomes So that's one view and I've I heard it in a number of conferences and you know It's it's a sensible way to think about the causation of poverty in the context of in particular development assistance and for some purposes Okay, but I also heard a very different Take on what causes poverty here at this conference and this comes out very prominently in the literature and This is going structural and so you're looking at more systemic roots of present-day poverty and so attention shifts from you know correlates of the poor to aspects of some kind of system be it the world Economic system the trade regime the food system or national level structures or subnational structures and You know if you if you scratch structure a little bit You're talking about power and the exercise of power and you know be it political economic military gender-based or what have you and really this is the world of political economy So when you're looking at present-day outcomes like poverty or whatever, you know The immediate question but it comes to mind is who benefits and in whose interest do these things serve? And so, you know, this is the this is what I heard in multiple sessions and it came out In discussion of the global of reform of the global economic system reform of trade question of political economy of food in Security it's like questions of agenda said who's making decisions what issues are on and off the table and so on Okay, and you know, obviously the relevance of this is because you know where you look causally When is where you want to go with respect to remedies? You know things that you think should be done so in terms of challenges or future challenges, I just have two points to make here and the first point is that You know structural change is a lot harder to affect and it's inherently political So, you know, you have this tension but on the other hand if it works it's more far-reaching so you got a tension between effectiveness on the one hand and Reach on the other. I don't know how you mediate that but I just throw it on the table and then secondly You know is the role of development assistance in this in this context And you know, I'm like I'm convinced by Finn's type of analysis that development assistance can work But is it confined to incremental supposed to more transformational change? So these are just some issues which seem to me to be relevant Okay, I think I've talked for too long and I'm sorry about that. So basically I said three things I said multi-dimensionality stocks and flows causation structure versus Production function, that's how I see some of these things hanging together and that's my attempt to De-silo some of these disparate issues. Thank you