Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Dire Poverty Falls Despite Global Slump, Report Finds


WASHINGTON — A World Bank report shows a broad reduction in extreme poverty — and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world.
The report shows that for the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty — on less than $1.25 a day — fell in every developing region from 2005 to 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate.The progress is so drastic that the world has met the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline.
Read it at The New York Times
Dire Poverty Falls Despite Global Slump, Report Finds
by Annie Lowrey

2 comments:

Matt Franko said...

$1.25/day.... I think their threshold may be a bit low????


Resp,

Tom Hickey said...

Not necessarily, Matt. It is impossible to judge based on US standards. This is why US importers can reap such large margins by buying at foreign prices and selling at US prices. The mark-ups can be huge based on US perceptions wrt anchor bias. I have friends that do this for a living, so I know the margins. It is all based on playing on perception.