One in 10 people in the world lives in . According to the United Nations scale, an individual is in this situation when he subsists on less than 1.90 dollars a day. However, also. The researcher and founder of Our World in Data, Max Roser, turns the figures upside down by putting on the table a different scale for poverty, but real, which gives a more complete perspective of the issue: 85% of the world’s population can also be considered poor.
Poverty does not depend on the individual person, on who they are, but on where they were born. The different economic standards of each country and region of the globe determine the lines in which someone can be considered ‘poor’. Thus, if in South Sudan a person lives, on average, with less than 1.12 dollars, the poverty line cannot be placed at the 1.90 dollars a day established by the UN. In the same way as in Luxembourg, where a standard citizen lives with 86 dollars, the poverty line multiplies the extreme calculation of the international entity.
If only people who live in a situation of extreme poverty are taken into account, we can only take into account 10% of the population. In other words, the majority of the population is invisible when it comes to measuring global poverty. For this reason, researchers such as Lant Pritchett advocate introducing a different standard that describes what it is like to be poor in rich countries, which Roser calls ‘moderate poverty’.
Pritchett made a proposal nearly a decade ago, based on the cost of living at the time. He took into account what was considered to be living in poverty in each country. Thus he arrived at the magic figure of 30 dollars a day, the umbrella under which the poor in Europe and the US remain.
If we take this figure as a reference to identify the deficiencies of the population in the world, then 85% of people are stuck in this moderate poverty to which the researchers allude. We can lower and raise this bar to other numbers: 92% subsist on less than $45 a day, and 78% on less than $20. The data, warns the researcher, of coronavirus.
Whether we take a higher or lower scale, the conclusion is crystal clear: three quarters of the inhabitants of the globe are poor. Moderate, but poor.
Graphic: Our World in Data.
Roser explains in his article (Global poverty in an unequal world: who is considered poor in a rich country?) that this new parameter is forceful enough to make greater efforts to eradicate poverty, something that not even the territories have achieved. more developed.
The also director of the Martin Program for Global Development at the University of Oxford states that countries with a smaller population living in poverty combine two circumstances: they have sustained high economic growth over the decades. He warns Roser of the suitability of learning, a country that has managed to leave poverty in its recent history, in the last 200 years. The key lies, fundamentally, in the fact that it has experienced two centuries of uninterrupted economic growth.
This shows, for the researcher, that it is possible to leave poverty behind, and that this largely depends on encouraging the growth of the national economy and laying foundations that guarantee equality among its citizens. “What these data suggest to me is that the story of poverty reduction in the world has only just begun,” he concludes.
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