Wal-mart seems to be out-doing the World Bank at alleviating poverty.  When you think of this in the light of the Japanese economic rise it makes more sense.  Yes, I know, Wal-mart has wreaked havoc in some communities in the US and blessed others,  It's a scourge and an oasis.  One thing's for sure, it doesn't seem to be going away.

disclaimer:  I do not shop there have never owned any Wal-mart stock.  I have been inside them a dozen times in different areas of the Western US.

www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=082206D

Moreover, most of the sweatshops workers in Japan in the 1950s and 60s, as well as the most of the sweatshop workers in Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s and 80s, are now middle class retirees in developed nations. Likewise most of the "underpaid" Chinese workers of today will retire in a state of comfort and luxury unimaginable to them in their rural youth, as average Chinese wages will gradually rise just as they have risen in every other nation that has experienced long-term economic growth. At present rates of economic growth, China will reach a U.S. standard of living in 2031.

Paul Krugman, one of the most aggressively left-liberal economists writing today, understands how economic growth helps the poor:

"These improvements ... [are] the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better."[15]

The Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas once said "Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else." Non-economists, especially those associated with the environmental movement, regard this as evidence that economics is a form of brain damage, a cancer on our earth. But rural Chinese peasants surviving on less than a dollar per day do not regard economic growth, or Wal-Mart factory jobs, as a cancer. When a Mongolian student at a U.S. workshop on globalization heard U.S. college students denounce sweatshops, he shouted: "Please give us your sweatshops!

An unreflective passion for social justice may be one of the biggest obstacles to creating peace and prosperity in the 21st century. While there are most certainly factory owners in China whom we would rightly regard as criminal in their treatment of their workers, it is very important not to confuse these incidents with the phenomenon of globalization. It is a good thing that Wal-Mart is encouraging more humane standards in its supplier's factories. And yet it is also important to remember that Wal-Mart's "vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market" is a vast pipeline of prosperity for the hundreds of millions of rural Chinese whose lives are more difficult than we can imagine.

Act locally, think globally: Shop Wal-Mart.