Poverty, Politics and Aid: is a reframing of global poverty approaching?

This paper argues that a significant reframing of global poverty is likely to emerge in the next decade as world poverty becomes less about the transfer of aid and more about domestic distribution and thus domestic politics. This proposition is based on a discussion of the shift of much of global poverty towards middle-income countries. There are questions arising related to how countries are classified and to administrative capacities, as well as to domestic political economy, but it is argued that many of the world's extreme poor already live in countries where the total cost of ending extreme and even moderate poverty is not prohibitively high as a percentage of GDP. By 2020, even on fairly conservative estimates, most of world poverty may be in countries that do have the domestic financial resources to end at least extreme poverty; this could imply a reframing of global poverty.