World Bank Counts More Poor People - washingtonpost.com
The report, the World Bank’s most ambitious attempt ever to update its poverty estimates, suggests that while huge economic progress has been made around the world, many nations, including emerging juggernauts such as China, are not as rich as many had thought. Previously, the bank had estimated that 6 percent of Chinese were living in severe poverty; it now estimates the figure to be almost 16 percent.
The figures, which incorporate data from 2005, do not factor in the impact of soaring food and energy prices over the past year. But they amount “to a quantum leap forward in our understanding of poverty in the developing world,” said co-author Martin Ravallion, director of the bank’s Development Research Group.
While the report found that roughly 26 percent of the world’s population is now living in extreme poverty — as opposed to 17.2 percent, as previously estimated — it also confirmed that poverty has been reduced in some regions, most stunningly in East Asia.
China’s rise has also lifted the fortunes of neighboring countries. Roughly 1 billion people, or 79 percent of the population in East Asia, mostly in China, were living in severe poverty in 1981. The report estimates that figure fell to 337 million, or 18 percent of the region, by 2005.
NASH: We’ve simply got to care more and that means do more. It’s immoral for us to do nothing. To close our eyes - to borrow a phrase from the late Dr. Martin Luther King - to the ocean of poverty that surrounds our island of prosperity.
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