UNU/Wider: The Impact of Globalization on the World's Poor

Globalization offers new opportunities for accelerating development and poverty reduction, but also poses new challenges for policymakers. And there is much concern about the distribution of benefits; in particular whether the poor gain from globalization, and under what circumstances it may actually hurt them. To meet this important agenda, this project aims at producing rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the poverty impact of globalization, thereby providing a framework upon which to build strategies for pro-poor globalization'. The project is particularly interested in understanding better the mechanisms through which globalization ultimately affects poverty. And it is important to evaluate how different poor groups are affected in different ways by globalization (the rural versus urban poor for example). The project will produce thematic papers as well as country and regional case studies of globalization's poverty impact.