Statistics on Poverty and Absolute Income Levels
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Via The Economist:
Just over a quarter of the world’s population, or 1.4 billion people, lived in extreme poverty in 2005, according to a report released this week from the World Bank. This has fallen from 42% in 1990, when the bank first published its global poverty estimates. All regions of the world have seen gains. Rapid economic growth east Asia in particular has led to a dramatic decline in global poverty. In China the share of the population getting by on $1.25 a day, or less, fell from 60.2% to 15.9%. But the bank gives warning that the global recession may tip between 55m and 90m back into poverty this year as remittances, foreign investment and trade, vital to the poorest countries, dry up.
More on the possible consequences of the recession here, here and here.
(source, poverty rate for the developing world as a whole over 1981-2005 using two poverty lines, $1.25 and $2.00 a day, at 2005 purchasing power parity, PPP, for consumption; the former line is the average of the national poverty lines found in the poorest 15 countries and the latter line is the average for the developing world as a whole)
