Friday, July 20, 2012

Talk about subsidies


This is going to be a super-short post, referring to one sentence in the book Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz (ISBN 978-0-141-02496-7).
On page 85 we read:
The average European cow gets a subsidy of $2 a day (the World Bank measure of poverty); more than half of the people in the developing world live on less than that. It appears that it is better to be a cow in Europe than to be a poor person in a developing country.
The author is a Columbia University professor who has done a stint under the Clinton Administration in the US and also at the World Bank, as its Chief Economist.
Please comment on the quoted sentence above. Better still, say things against subsidies to the poor in India (ignore inefficient delivery of subsidies and corruption in India, as subsidizing a European cow IS inefficient and it IS corruption).
Raghuram Ekambaram

4 comments:

Indian Satire said...

raghu, all that i can say IMM next topic of discussion will be this. what an idea sirji

mandakolathur said...

Thank you so much Balu ... I will keep it coming and feed your mind with weird yet true ideas :)

RE

Tomichan Matheikal said...

Well, Raghuram, it's better to be a dog in a middle class family in Delhi. I see them being carried around in cars. In my own neighbourhood there are people who look after their dogs better than their children!

mandakolathur said...

Matheikal,

Cows, dogs, pigs ... children - is that the hierarchy? :)

And, we say that humans are perched at the top of the evolutionary tree.Obviously this is not true.

RE