Dire poverty falls despite global slump, report finds, By Annie Lowrey, March 6, 2012, New York Times: “A World Bank report shows a broad-based reduction in extreme poverty – and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world. The report shows that for the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty – on less than $1.25 a day – fell in every developing region between 2005 and 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate. The progress is so dramatic that the world has met the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline…”
Tag: Extreme poverty
Extreme Poverty Worldwide
- World’s extreme poverty cut in half since 1990, By Sudeep Reddy, February 29, 2012, Wall Street Journal: “The share of people living in extreme poverty around the world continued to decline in recent years despite financial crises and surging food prices, the World Bank said today. The bank said preliminary estimates for 2010 showed that the world’s extreme poverty rate – people living below $1.25 a day – had fallen to less than half of its 1990 value. That meets the first Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty from its 1990 level, before its 2015 deadline, the Washington-based development institution said…”
- WB sees progress against extreme poverty, February 29, 2012, The Himalayan: “In every region of the developing world, the percentage of people living on less than $1.25-a-day and the number of poor declined between 2005-2008, according to estimates released today by the World Bank (WB). This across-the-board reduction over a three-year monitoring cycle marks a first since the bank began monitoring extreme poverty. Similarly, South Asia witnessed the $1.25-a-day poverty rate fall from 61 per cent to 36 per cent between 1981 and 2005 and fell a further 3.5 percentage points between 2005 and 2008. The proportion of the population living in extreme poverty is now the lowest since 1981, the global agency said, adding that its methodology is based on consumption and income, adjusted for inflation within countries and for purchasing power differences across countries…”
Extreme Poverty in the US
More than 1.4 million families live on $2 a day per person, By Marisol Bello, February 23, 2012, USA Today: “The number of families living on $2 or less per person per day for at least a month in the USA has more than doubled in 15 years to 1.46 million. That’s up from 636,000 households in 1996, says a new study released by researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. Government benefits blunt the impact of such extreme poverty, but not completely, says one of the researchers, Luke Shaefer, a professor of social work at Michigan…”