Poverty and politics Learning Objectives
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To understand the importance of political decisions in development To appreciate that governments have different priorities To understand the importance of peace, law and order and legitimate authority To understand the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy To understand the roles of the different institutions of government.
The role of governments Politics is concerned with making decisions about all sorts of issues and can range in scale from small community matters to international agreements. A national government will decide: how the country’s natural and human resources are Definition used Sustainable: capable of how the country’s money is spent being continued without the laws by which the people are governed permanent damage to the how the country’s environment is protected environment whether or not development will be sustainable. There are three main political systems in which the state has different approaches to the distribution of the country’s resources and exerts different levels of power and control. 1. Capitalist – a system based on private ownership that relies on market forces rather than state control. 2. Socialist – a system based on public ownership and government control over the allocation of resources. 3. Communist – an economy that is managed and often highly planned by the state and based on common ownership.
Government income and expenditure A government gets its income from taxes, loans, foreign aid and from the users of services provided by the government. Taxes may be in the form of income tax from workers, business tax from industries, sales tax from when people buy goods and taxes on imports.