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Since the 1970s, the World Bank has had a new goal: poverty eradication. This essay evaluates the Bank according to this objective. Persisting poverty judges the organization's work negatively. The Bank's many policies were often even contradictory over time, bringing strong criticisms, which its current policies reflect. These are the lessons of former failures in the Banks poverty reductions policies: The Bank's strategies now concentrate on both the market & the state to promote "development." The causes of underdevelopment lie not only in bad governance, but also in states' unfavorable economic positions. It is important to cooperate with the poor while trying to reduce poverty. "Development" is not only an issue of domestic economic reforms: political & social reforms are also important. The World Bank's newest Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) reflect these changes. They should achieve the ambitious Millennium goals, but time will be their judge. Adapted from the source document.

Despite the growing intensity of international trade in the last decades and the work of global economic institutions, we still face a global poverty problem. Almost half of the global population lives in poverty. Moreover, there are many examples of growing poverty in developing countries during the 1990's. In the first part of this article, I will analyze the change in the global poverty situation between 1990 and 2001. The truth is that in many cases developing countries are themselves responsible for their underdevelopment. Yet there is some evidence that the developed world bears a certain amount of responsibility for global poverty, too. The purpose of this paper is not to analyze the concrete roots of poverty in specific developing countries, because the variability of possible factors is infinite. I will therefore try to identify only the most important (the most common) roots of poverty in developing countries -- this is why I use the term "global poverty" (meaning the poverty as a global problem). I will focus more on the international (external) causes of poverty in the developing world than on the internal ones. In the final part I will explore the arguments in favor of poverty reduction. Adapted from the source document.