Poverty in the Highly Developed Market Economies

The major countries of the North American continent, namely the USA and Canada, and the countries of Western Europe had virtually conquered the problem of poverty in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, though the conquest was not total. The advent of the market economy and the phenomena of the great economic revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries were responsible for lifting up the economic levels of these areas and reducing the extent as well as the intensity of poverty. The revolutions that emerged and coexisted in a telescopic manner comprised urbanization, the agricultural transformation, the commercial and industrial revolutions and, more recently, the technological and communications revolutions. The progress of rationality in the nineteenth century, the shift from autocratic to democratic regimes, the social revolution comprised by the emergence and strengthening of trade unionism, the extension of voting rights ending in adult franchise, the movement to establish the rights of women and the evolution of the welfare state, all played their role in promoting economic growth and social development. These far-reaching occurrences raised the standards and levels of living, created a new dynamism in economic, social and political organization and consolidated the welfare state of the twentieth century with its network of social services focusing, in particular, on education, health, unemployment compensations and old age benefits.