ABSTRACT
This book is about the lives of poor children, children whose experiences of life are bitter-if indeed they survive. Some of the reasons for their poverty lie, I suggest, not in their own countries, but in the rich world of Europe and the USA. A root cause is the economic inequality between North and South. In order to understand the cruel and chronic poverty many young children experience, we have to come to grips with these economic inequalities, even if they do not seem, on the face of it, to be directly related to children’s lives. Here I explain some of these complex economic arguments. I offer a very short primer about globalization and why it might be relevant to the lives of young children. I question the assumption that economic development is the only way to better the lives of poor children who live in poor countries.
