TMJC GP InfoPack Inequality and Poverty (2024 JC2)

1 INEQUALITY & POVERTY Tampines Meridian Junior College JC2 General Paper 2024 Term 1 Reading Set 1: Inequality Page 3 Reading Set 2: Poverty and its Other Causes Page 17 Reading Set 3: Addressing Poverty Page 25 Sample Students’ Essays Page 32 A Level Essay Questions Tested on Economics & Poverty Page 36

2 ● An Overview ● Unit Title: Inequality and Poverty Inquiry Question: Can equality for all ever be achieved? Inquiry Question: Are the poor an inevitable feature of any society? Inquiry Question: Can poverty ever be eradicated? Unit Strand 1a: Causes of inequality and their impacts Unit Strand 1b: Measures to solve inequality and their effectiveness Unit Strand: Causes of poverty take different forms and severity. Unit Strand: Different ways of reducing poverty and assessment of their effectiveness. Conceptual Lens: Complexity and Interaction Concepts: Discrimination, Class divide, Elitism, Injustice, Systemic perpetuation, Globalisation, Governance, Media representation, Stereotypes, Ageism Concepts: Absolute poverty, Relative poverty, Structural poverty, Poverty line, Poverty trap, Inflation Concepts: Foreign aid, Diplomacy, Nationalism, Globalisation, Sovereignty, Resource allocation Topics: Race, Gender, Religion, Income, Socio-economic status, Education Topics: Internal and External causes of poverty, Cost of living and impact on the poor, How poverty impacts the poor Topics: Measures to address poverty, Effectiveness of the measures, Challenges in the implementation of measures to address poverty Possible Generalisation: 1a: 1b: Possible Generalisation: Possible Generalisation:

3 Inquiry Question: Can equality for all ever be achieved? At the end of this section, students should be able to: ✓ Understand the complexity of the various forms of inequalities ✓ Recognise that equality for all is an ideal that is impossible to achieve ⚫ Inequality⚫ Article 1: Equality: Why it matters – United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Goal #10) Equality is about ensuring that every individual has an equal opportunity to make the most of their lives and talents. It is also the belief that no one should have poorer life chances because of the way they were born, where they come from, what they believe, or whether they have a disability. It is important to examine different factors such as globalisation, government policies, which ideally promotes equality for all. However, differential access to resources and opportunities exists, resulting in the debate on whether these factors truly benefit all equally. As such, inequality manifests itself in different forms, such as, race, gender, and income (amongst others). What’s the goal here? To reduce inequalities within and among countries. Why? Inequalities based on income, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, race, class, ethnicity, religion and opportunity continue to persist across the world, within and among countries. Inequality threatens long term social and economic development, harm s poverty reduction and destroys people’s sense of fulfilment and self -worth. This, in turn, can breed crime, disease and environmental degradation. Most importantly, we cannot achieve sustainable development and make the planet better for all if peopl e are excluded from opportunities, services, and the chance for a better life. What are some examples of inequality? An estimated 69 million children under five years of age will die from mostly preventable causes. Rural women are three times more likely to die while giving birth than women in urban centres. Many families in developing countries are living in societies where income is more unequally distributed than it was in the 1990s. These are just a few examples, but it is an issue that affects every country in the world. Why should I need to care about inequality if I don’t face any discrimination? In today’s world, we are all interconnected. Problems and challenges, be they poverty, climate change, migration or economic crises are never just confined to one country or region. Even the richest countries still have communities living in abject poverty. The oldest democracies still wrestle with racism, homophobia and transphobia, and religious intolerance. A recent UNICEF report noted growing inequality among children in seve ral high -income countries. Global inequality affects us all, no matter who we are or where we are from. Article 2: Is a globalised world a less equal world? Diana Schoder | American Economic Association | June 15, 2018. Whether Brexit, offshoring, or China’s growing middle class, globalisation is at the core of many issues today. But often, globalisation gets too much credit for changing the world — and potentially too much blame. This is especially true of global income inequality. A common narrative frames globalisation as the cause of inequality: by shifting low-skilled jobs from wealthier countries to poorer countries, economic integration has increased inequality within countries while lowering inequality between them. However, the story is more complex. It is true that the poor and middle class of the developed world have seen little real income gain from globalisation. At the same time, the global elite have continued to experience substantial gains. Clearly, the benefits of economic change have not reached everyone equally. Yet, globalisation is only one factor in this unequal distribution. Other factors like new technology, unequal education, deregulation, and differing social welfare policies help to explain these trends as well. People must understand the more nuanced — but also more complete — reasons behind inequality in order to tackle its consequences. Reading Set 1

4 This diversity of outcomes suggests that policymakers should not use globalisation alone as a scapegoat for inequality. As nations adopt stances on education and health policies, minimum wages, taxes, social programs, and basic incomes, they can mitigate or exacerbate the effects of globalisation. Traditional economic thought however, suggests that countries should have experienced rising GDPs per capita from new levels of international trade. At the very least, trade should not have had a negative impact. On average, however, the increasing trade traced back to the introduction of the steamship in the late 1860s through the 1870s lowered countries’ GDPs per capita and made most countries worse off. Countries with initially low levels of economic development were especially hurt, whereas most wealthy nations experienced neither losses nor gains. However, in addition to GDP per capita, the quality of a country’s institutions helped to determine the impact of globalisation. A high-quality institution is one that constrains the decision- making abilities of people in power, which reduces corruption and allows citizens to benefit from their countries’ policies. To benefit from globalisation, it was not enough to start off as a wealthy country; countries had to have excellent institutions, too. Of course, institutions may represent a more fundamental reason that some countries benefited from trade while others did not. Countries that specialise in manufacturing tend to have better institutions than those that specialise in agriculture, and so industry could be the root cause. Nonetheless, institutional quality does a good job of predicting which countries had the most to gain — and in many cases, the most to lose — from growing international trade. As some countries reaped the benefits of globalisation, others fell behind. This gap between “winners” and “losers” spurred an economic divergence between rich and poor countries that has persisted for decades. Although it may not explain today’s economic divides, this historical period can still shed light on how globalisa