Column: End world poverty? Shop Wal-Mart?
View your credit file based on any of the UK credit reference agencies, or all three at once
LifeLock is the only Identity Theft Prevention Solution backed by a one-million dollar guarantee!Click here to get a 10% discount.
U.N. environmental consultant Rene Dubois might be horrified to see the phrase he coined in 1972 applied to the world's largest retailer, the source of all evil for many so-called progressives these days.
And yet ...
Dubois was suggesting that ecological awareness should begin at home, asking us to think about how our individual actions reverberate through the environment and culture even on a global scale. In the area of economics, there is nowhere this insight might better be applied than to the relationship between Wal-Mart shoppers and millions of Chinese peasants looking for a way out of grinding poverty.
Consider some numbers:
鈥rom 1990 to 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month, according to the Asian Development Bank.
鈥al-Mart had an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005; perhaps 70 percent of Wal-Mart's products are made by various manufacturers in China; in addition, Wal-Mart has 60 retail stores in China and directly employs about 30,000 Chinese.
鈥xtrapolating from these numbers, Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing out of poverty about 460,000 Chinese per year, according to Industry Week magazine.
So, even without considering the $263 billion in consumer savings that Wal-Mart provides for low-income Americans, or the millions lifted out of poverty by Wal-Mart in other developing nations, it is unlikely that there is any single organization on the planet that alleviates poverty so effectively for so many people as Wal-Mart does in China. Moreover, insofar as China's rapid manufacturing growth has been associated with a decline in its status as a global arms dealer, Wal-Mart has also done more than its share in contributing to global peace.
More Related Questions and Answers ...
The loan information post by website user , we not guarantee correctness.