In less than 20 years, extreme poverty on the planet has been cut in half. However, this remarkable feat could easily slip through our fingers as climate change increases.
It’s not me who says it or an environmental activist, it’s rather an economist from the very serious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Esther Duflo.
The one who became the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 was in Montreal on Friday at the invitation of the Center for International Studies and Research (CÉRIUM), the Observatory on Inequalities and the Metropolis Festival. blue.
“By 2100, climate change will erase the progress we have made in fighting poverty and improving the quality of life,” she told an audience who drank in her words. .
Extreme poverty is his domain. With her husband, who is also her closest collaborator and co-winner of the Nobel Prize, Abhijit Banerjee, she has spent the last decades studying it and, above all, testing various measures to curb it. A poverty laboratory that she set up today collaborates with hundreds of researchers in 95 countries.
It is moreover this very practical way, “very rooted in reality” of doing economics that convinced the Frenchwoman who grew up in Paris to do her doctorate at MIT, in Boston. And to pursue his career there.
Through tests, data collection and analysis, Mme Duflo and his collaborators find the solutions that work best and on which governments can rely. And the subjects of study are many: the distribution of mosquito nets to counter malaria, approaches to improving the mental health of the elderly, the teaching of mathematics, adherence to vaccination, the effect of quotas for women in politics and the real impact of microcredit are just a few.
The fallout from this research has had an impact on 600 million human beings, estimates Ms.me Duflo. We are far from the theory.
More recently, the expert has turned her attention to the intersection between poverty, inequality and climate change.
Based on a study by Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago, Esther Duflo asserts that while climate change will reduce mortality somewhat in the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the quality of life will deteriorate and mortality will skyrocket in emerging countries. “But the instruments to control this global warming are not in the hands of those who will suffer the most”, she notes, recalling that it is the richest countries who are responsible for this planetary degradation.
To face this challenge, the economist does not see a thousand solutions. She believes that progressive taxes should be imposed on the very wealthy and large corporations based on both their assets and their environmental footprint.
A percentage of the money thus collected must be sent to the poorest countries, in particular through the United Nations Green Fund. “It’s good to have created a fund, but now it takes money in it,” quips the economist, met on the sidelines of the conference.
None of this will happen by snapping your fingers. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that international solidarity is, at best, shaky. “What we have seen in COVID is that under the effect of a crisis, we are unable to think of others,” notes the economist.
Esther Duflo fears that the same “every man for himself” which notably slowed down the distribution of vaccines during the pandemic will be repeated as climate-related disasters will intensify. “Even if our crises in the West are less serious, we risk putting all our resources there, like Amsterdam, which could spend huge sums to build ever higher dikes, she notes, but forgetting that during this time , Bangladesh and the Maldives are completely under water. »
While forgetting that the misfortune of some is also ours.
Who is Esther Duflo?
- Born in France in 1972, Esther Duflo is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
- In 2009, she founded the Poverty Action Laboratory (J-PAL) at MIT.
- In 2019, she won, together with Abhijit V. Banerjee (her husband) and Michael Kremer, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics.
- She has published several books, including Rethinking poverty (2012) and Useful economy for difficult times (2020).