The Economist has
an interesting piece on extreme global poverty:
“The global poverty
count should also elicit a kind of embarrassment. As the world economy grows
ever more prosperous and sophisticated, the problem of extreme poverty looks
less like a tragic inevitability and more like a peculiar anachronism. The
average person in extreme poverty lives on $1.33 per day. It would therefore
take just $0.57 per day to rescue them from this plight. That observation
invites a thought experiment. If it were somehow possible to transfer without
cost the right amount of money into the right hands, how much would it take to
end extreme poverty altogether? The answer is just $159 billion a year,
according to the World Bank, or less than 0.2% of global GDP.
That estimate is calculated at purchasing-power parity. If an actual dollar were transferred to a poor country from America, it would stretch much further, because prices in poor countries tend to be lower ... Taking these lower prices into account, the amount needed to bring all the world’s poor up to the poverty line drops to $78 billion a year, or just 0.1% of global GDP”
That estimate is calculated at purchasing-power parity. If an actual dollar were transferred to a poor country from America, it would stretch much further, because prices in poor countries tend to be lower ... Taking these lower prices into account, the amount needed to bring all the world’s poor up to the poverty line drops to $78 billion a year, or just 0.1% of global GDP”