By Victoria Hines

World leaders are anticipated to make the rigorous, if not impossible, attempt to introduce 169 targets for investment as part of the new Sustainable Development Goals. What then should the 160 Heads of State and leaders of multilateral bodies, including the World Trade Organization (WTO), focus their attention on to ensure such credible ideas are converted into effective policies? The Copenhagen Consensus Center, pending next week’s United Nations summit in New York for the adaptation of the post-2015 development agenda, has brought this crucial question to the forefront. Their findings suggest that freer trade from the completion of the WTO’s Doha agreement “would lift 160 million people out of extreme poverty, giving every person in the developing world an extra $1,000 in income every year by 2030.”

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September 25, 2015

By Reem Gaafar*

At the time of its writing, the U.S. Constitution did not define who was eligible to vote. Each state was given the authority to determine eligibility. In most states, access to the ballot box was reserved for white males who owned at least 50 acres of land or had taxable income. This is a great example of how property ownership functions as a gateway right. In this case, those without property rights did not have political rights.

Today, land rights remain a gateway right in much of the world.

Consider the plight of the landless poor in India. An estimated 20 million rural families—children, women, and men—across India are landless. First and foremost, their landlessness traps them in poverty. They lack the most important asset in a rural society – land. Without secure land rights, they don’t have the security, opportunity or incentive to make the sort of long-term investments in their land that can improve their harvests and their income. What’s more, their landlessness means that they often do not appear in any government records – making them ineligible for a wide variety government services. In fact, often they cannot even access the government services created specifically to help the poor.

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December 12, 2014