Global Poverty

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The reason why it is important to define global poverty (from http://www.ingridrobeyns.nl/Downloads/globalpoor.pdf): Sanjay Reddy and Thomas Pogge do not limit themselves to criticizing the World Bank statistics. Their alternative is that our global poverty measures should start from a clear conceptualization of what it means to be extremely poor, like not having sufficient food, not being sheltered, not having the absolute basic goods such as clothing. They suggest that we should decide on such a poverty definition through an international dialogue. Once we roughly agree on what the absolute minimum requirements are to escape extreme poverty, we can translate this into a financial amount at the local level. Only with such a method will we be able to count the poor in a meaningful way."

1) From Okinawa Summit (G8) - July 2000

"Poverty goes beyond lack of income. It encompasses economic, social, and governance dimensions. Economically, the poor are not only deprived of income and resources, but of opportunities. Markets and jobs are often difficult to access, because of low capabilities and geographical and social exclusion. Limited access to education affects the ability of the poor to get jobs and to obtain information that could improve the quality of their lives. Poor health du to inadequate nutrition, hygiene and health services further limits their prospects for work and from realizing their mental and physical potential. This fragile position is exacerbated by insecurity. Living in marginal conditions with no resources to fall back on, shocks become hard or impossible to offset. The situation is made worse by the structure of societies and institutions that tend to exclude the poor from participating in decision-making over the direction of social and economic development."

2) From Netaid webpage (www.netaid.org - whose source is Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty (2005); World Bank)

"Each year, more than 8 million people around the world die because they are too poor to stay alive. Over 1 billion people - 1 in 6 people around the world - live in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1 (US) a day. Nearly 3 billion - half of the world's population - are considered poor".

3) "Global poverty, ramifications affect countries around the world" from Oklahoma Online (April 4, 2005) by Sean Kennedy.

"The continuing poverty of over one billion people in today's world is a major cause, either directly or indirectly, of some of the most dangerous problems we are facing today," said Fred Gibson.

Gibson moderated a discussion on global poverty as part of the Foreign Policy Discussion Series held Friday at noon at Tahlequah Public Library.

One of the biggest problems facing the world is that poverty stricken nations seem to have no way of getting out of poverty without assistance from other richer nations.

In recent years, some improvements to global poverty have been made, but no solution to the problem has been found and no one concept works the same way for every country.

"In the last two decades, global poverty has actually gone down," said Gibson. "More people than ever before have access to an education, and the world literacy rate is 20 percent higher that in the early 1980s. Since 1990, over 500 million more people have safe drinking water available, and over 430 million more have adequate sanitation facilities."

The life expectancy for people living in low income nations has also increased from 53 to 59 years and information mortality is lower than at any time in history.

 4) Excerpts from The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs - "The World Bank estimates that 1.1 billion people live in extreme poverty. Asia leads in numbers, but Africa has the largest proportion: nearly half its population"

"Nearly half the 6 billion people in the world are poor. As a matter of definition, there are three degrees of poverty: extreme (or absolute) poverty, moderate poverty and relative poverty. Extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as getting by on an income of less than $1 a day, means that households cannot meet basic needs for survival. They are chronically hungry, unable to get health care, lack safe drinking water and sanitation, cannot afford education for their children and perhaps lack rudimentary shelter - a roof to keep rain out of the hut - and basic articles of clothing, like shoes. "

"Every situation of extreme poverty around the world contains some of its own unique causes, which needs to be diagnosed just as a doctor would a patient. For example, Africa is burdened with malaria like no other part of the world, simply because it is unlucky in providing the perfect conditions for that disease: high temperatures, plenty of breeding sites and particular species of malaria - transmitting mosquitoes that prefer to bite humans rather than cattle."

5) From the paper, "Unknown: The Extent, Distribution, and Trend of Global Income Poverty" by Thomas W. Pogge and Sanjay G. Reddy; Version 3.4, July 26th, 2003

"Most readers, including many economists, take these figures (referring to statistics given out by World Bank) as clear-cut facts. But the method used to calculate them has serious flaws, which render the resulting estimates untrustworthy. First, the IPL used by the Bank to identify the absolutely poor fails to meet elementary requirements of consistency. It does not have a common interpretation (in terms of purchasing power) across countries and years. As a result, the Bank's poverty line leads to meaningless poverty estimates, as some of those identified as poor have clearly greater command over commodities than some of those identified as non-poor. These inconsistencies are an inherent consequence of the Bank's method and cannot be eliminated without jettisoning the method altogether. Second, the Bank's poverty line is not anchored in any assessment of the basic resource requirements of human beings. Third, the poverty estimates currently available are subject to massive uncertainties because of their sensitivity to the values of crucial parameters that are estimated on the basis of limited data or none at all. An alternative method of estimating global poverty is feasible and necessary.

Data about income poverty are of great importance for the design and evaluation of policies and institutions. To be sure, there are other important sources of information about people's standard of living: data about their health status and educational attainments and about mortality and morbidity, for example. Such data do and should inform overall judgments concerning the extent, distribution, and trend of poverty in the world. Income poverty data are nevertheless an essential part of the picture.

Despite the Bank's substantial efforts, we do not yet know with any reasonable degree of confidence how many income poor people there are in the world, how poor they are, where they live, and how their number has changed over time. If we are to monitor progress against absolute income poverty, as the first of the Millennium Development Goals requires, then this gap must urgently be filled.

Fortunately, the serious flaws in the Bank's method have a common root and are avoidable through one straightforward innovation: The definition of severe income poverty must be more appropriately focused on what being poor consists in: on what people generally need to achieve a set of elementary capabilities, rather than on arbitrary dollar amounts. This would give the IPL a clear and plausible meaning: those living below it lack the resources they need to satisfy the most basic requirements of human beings." 

 

 

Contributed by Jiette Lee