Det går den rigtige vej med verdens mest ekstreme fattigdom – når folk lever fra hånden i munden -, viser rapport fra Verdensbanken. Især i Kina går det fremad. Alligevel har 2,47 milliarder højst 11-12 kr. om dagen, heraf lever 1,29 mia. for endnu mindre.
De 2,47 mia. er så mange, at det samtidig beskriver vilkårene for næsten halvdelen (43 pct.) af u-landenes befolkning, som fører en tilværelse på de yderste marginaler.
U-landskommentatorer og journalist Knud Vilby glæder sig trods alt over tendensen, men siger i Berlingske fredag, at “man ikke skal glemme, at den positive udvikling primært skyldes Kina, hvor over en halv milliard nu er kommet på den anden side af fattigdomsgrænsen”.
“Ser man bort fra Kina, er tallene ret små, men da bestemt positive, lægger han til.
Vilby gør gælden-de, at der også er kommet mere optimisme om udviklingen i Afrika, og “hvis de fik styr på befolk-ningsvæksten, ville det gå endnu bedre”.
“I Rwanda vakte det voldsom debat, da sundhedsmini-steren gik ud og foreslog en to-barnspolitik. Det er stadig et stort tabu at diskutere den slags i Afrika”, anfører han overfor Berlingske.
Verdensbankens pressemeddelelse:
WASHINGTON, 29th February, 2012: In every region of the developing world, the percentage of people living on less than 1,25 US dollar (ca. 7 DKR) a day and the number of poor declined between 2005-2008, according to estimates released Wednesday by the World Bank.
This across-the-board reduction over a three-year monitoring cycle marks a first since the Bank began monitoring extreme poverty.
An estimated 1,29 billion people in 2008 lived below 1,25 dollar a day, equivalent to 22 percent of the population of the developing world. By contrast, 1,94 billion people were living in extreme poverty in 1981.
Update from nearly 130 countries
The update draws on over 850 household surveys in nearly 130 coun-tries. 2008 is the latest date for which a global figure can be calculated.
This is because, while more recent statistics for middle income countries are available, for low-income countries newer data are either scarce (en mangelvare) or not comparable with previous estimates.
More recent post-2008 analysis reveals that, while the food, fuel and financial crises over the past four years had at times sharp negative impacts on vulnerable (sårbare) populations and slowed the rate of poverty reduction in some countries, global poverty overall kept falling.
In fact, preliminary survey-based estimates for 2010 – based on a smaller sample size than in the global update – indicate that the 1,25 dollar a day poverty rate had fallen to under half of its 1990 value by 2010.
This would mean that the first Millennium Development Goal (2015 Mål) of halving extreme poverty from its 1990 level has been achieved before the 2015 deadline.
“The developing world as a whole has made considerable progress in fighting extreme poverty, but the 663 million people who moved above the poverty lines typical of the poorest countries are still poor by the standards of middle- and high-income countries”, says Martin Ravallion, director of the Bank’s Research Group and leader of the team that produced the numbers, adding:
“This bunching up (trængsel) just above the extreme poverty line is indicative of the vulnerability facing a great many poor people in the world. And at the current rate of progress, around 1 billion people would still live in extreme poverty in 2015.
And how about the lesser poor?
The 1,25 dollar poverty line is the average for the world’s poorest 10 to 20 countries. A higher line of two dollar (11-12 DKR) a day (the median poverty line for developing countries) reveals less progress versus 1,25 a day.
Indeed, there was only a modest drop in the number of people living below two dollar per day between 1981 and 2008, from 2,59 billion to 2,47 billion, though falling more sharply since 1999.
“Having 22 percent of people in developing countries still living on less than 1,25 dollar a day and 43 percent with less than two dollar a day is intolerable. We need to increase our efforts”, says Jaime Saavedra, director of the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Equity Group, adding:
“On the policy and program side, we need to continue attacking poverty on many fronts, from creating more and better jobs, to delivering better educational and health services and basic infrastructure, to protecting the vulnerable. And on the measurement side (når vi måler tallene), countries need to expand data collection and strengthen statistical capacity, particularly in low-income countries.
The public can access all statistics underlying the new international estimates via the online tool, PovcalNet http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet
The site also provides estimates more recent than 2008.
“PovcalNet is the Bank’s interactive Open Data tool for poverty and inequality measurement. With PovcalNet, users get access to the data and can replicate the Bank’s estimates or calculate poverty rates using any poverty line or country groupings they like,” says Shaohua Chen, Senior Statistician in the Bank’s Research Group.
The World Bank’s methodology is based on consumption and income, adjusted for inflation within countries and for purchasing power differences (forskelle i købekraft) across countries.
REGIONAL HIGHLIGHTS
Læs videre på
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:23130032~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html
