Can international businesses play a role in helping nations in the region to reduce poverty?

VN: Can international businesses play a role in helping nations in the region to reduce poverty?
Can international businesses play a role in helping nations in the region to reduce poverty and ignite economic growth? Explain your response and include ideas for programs to help reduce poverty and spur growth.

Answers and Views:

Answer by miss_jen_b
Yes, this is seen in several countries.

Take Bangladesh…check the tags of your clothes and you’ll find that a great deal of clothes come from there. Bangladesh has a lot of people and scarce resources. So several clothing companies take advantage of the abundant labor and use them to produce cheaper clothing. (This can be exploitation from a humanitarian view if you actually think that wages should be standardized and children shouldn’t work in sweatshops…that’s crap – we’re talking business, money is key – let philosophers worry about humanitarianism). It seems like a bad thing when you think that people work to sell expensive clothes overseas while they only make 65cents per hour. But at the same time, without that job in a sweatshop, then they wouldn’t have anywhere else to work… The incomes that these sweatshops do generate help the economy by giving laborers more money to spend.

There are some hippy programs that try to spur economic growth by having African villages make handicrafts (necklaces, sweaters, sculptures) which are sold overseas. There’s a high end clothing line that uses unemployed women in the Gaza Strip to do embroidery which is encorporated onto clothing – it gives the women income! These types of programs help reduce poverty…however they don’t create a strong foundation for economic growth (meaning, as soon as the shops stop selling handicrafts abroad…the african villages are left with no industry).