Topic: Development
$365 a year with which to support yourself. It has been the standard for measuring absolute poverty since I started working in development. Since the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) are in the news this week due to the UN summit, and one of the aims of the MDGs is to dramatically reduce the number of people living on $1 per day by 2015, it's now news that maybe this measure isn't quite as absolute as it's made out to be:
Critics say the $1-a-day measurement of poverty does not distinguish between the widely different experiences of the poor, which cannot be measured simply by looking at income.
"The ... fundamental question is whether such statistical propositions as the $1-a-day-life reflect any reality that real people live in," asked Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul in his recently published book "The End of Globalism."
"After all, people at $3 a day could be living a life of pure despair in a savage slum of Lagos, a life far worse than that at $1 a day in a stable slum like Klong Toey in Bangkok, where there is a societal structure," he wrote.
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The World Bank says the number of people living on less than $1 a day fell to 1.1 billion in 2001 from 1.5 billion in 1981 -- a much trumpeted trend that mostly reflects the economic rise of China and India.It seems a bit absurd, doesn't it, to quibble over the dollar amount at which the poverty line should be drawn, when trying to live on $3 per day sounds every bit as impossible as living on $1 a day. I'm with the "[c]ritics [who] contend that the goals themselves set an objective on poverty that obscures the complexity of the problem and that focusing on the $1-a-day measure can be misleading", but realistically, I don't expect this measure to be displaced by a more complex one any time soon. For one thing, it's relatively simple information to acquire and to compare across time. For another, it satisfies a psychological need to have clear lines drawn against which to measure progress (or the lack thereof). And, perhaps most tellingly, it situates "extreme poverty" squarely in the "developing" world, and doesn't shift the focus back to the ways that Western countries are failing to meet the needs of their own poor, as a more complex measure might.
But it also says the number living on less than $2 a day increased to 2.7 billion in 2001 from 2.4 billion in 1981.
"The 1.6 billion people in the middle, between the $1 and $2 a day poverty lines, are still very poor and remain vulnerable to economic slowdowns," it said in a recent report.
So if the goal posts were moved, and $2 a day was the benchmark -- and it is the preferred measure of some analysts -- it would suggest that global poverty is in fact on the rise.