Poverty affects how many people

Public infrastructure has been destroyed. She now lives in a garage in Lebanon, which has been weatherproofed and plumbed by Concern Worldwide, with her surviving daughter and grandson. But the nature of conflict has changed in the last few decades, and violence has become more localized.

This also has a huge impact on communities, especially those that were already struggling. Fighting can stretch out for years, if not decades, and leave families in a permanent state of alert.

This makes it hard to plan for the long-term around family businesses, farms, or education. You might think that poverty causes hunger and you would be right! But hunger is also a cause — and maintainer — of poverty. Or their immune system will weaken from malnutrition and leave them more susceptible to illness that prevents them from getting to work. This can lead to a vicious cycle, especially for children. For children born into low-income families, health is also a key asset to their breaking the cycle of poverty.

However, if a mother is malnourished during pregnancy, that can be passed on to her children. Previously they had no livestock. As we saw above with the effects of hunger, extreme poverty and poor health go hand-in-hand. In countries with weakened health systems, easily-preventable and treatable illnesses like malaria , diarrhea, and respiratory infections can be fatal. Especially for young children. When people must travel far distances to clinics or pay for medicine, it drains already vulnerable households of money and assets.

This can tip a family from poverty into extreme poverty. For women in particular, pregnancy and childbirth can be a death sentence. Maternal health is often one of the most overlooked areas of healthcare in countries that are still built around patriarchal structures.

Adolescent girls who are pregnant especially out of wedlock face even greater inequities and discrimination. To break the cycle of hunger, we have to begin by ensuring that expecting and new mothers and their young children have the health and nutrition support they need. This means that people collectively spend million hours every day walking long distances to fetch water. Contaminated water can also lead to a host of waterborne diseases, ranging from the chronic to the life-threatening.

Poor water infrastructure — such as sanitation and hygiene facilities — can compound this. It can also create other barriers to escaping poverty, such as preventing girls from going to school during their cycles. A girl collects water from a spring near a gold mine in Gaga village, CAR.

When conflict erupted in October , 58 wells were contaminated with dead bodies and rendered unusable. How do we know the history of extreme poverty? Economic growth — How do economies become more productive? Understanding how and when countries achieved economic growth is crucial to understand how some countries left the worst poverty behind and how other countries can follow.

Income inequality — It is not just the average income that matters for whether or not people live in poverty but how incomes are distributed. Global economic inequality — Our entry on the global distribution of incomes. Over the course of the last generation more than a billion people left the most destitute living conditions behind.

Can we expect this progress to continue over the coming decade? The world economy is growing. In less than a generation the value of the yearly global economic production has doubled. Increasing productivity around the world meant that many left the worst poverty behind.

More than a third of the world population now live on more than 10 dollars per day. Just a decade decade ago it was only a quarter. In absolute numbers this meant the number of people who live on more than 10 dollars per day increased by million in just the last 10 years.

This expansion of the global middle class went together with progress in reducing global poverty — no matter what poverty line you want to compare it with, the share of the world population below this poverty line declined. That is a very low poverty line and focusses on what is happening to the very poorest people on the planet. The same international organizations that set the poverty line made it a global goal to end extreme poverty.

The deadline for achieving this goal is Can we expect to achieve this? All expect some positive development — the number of people in extreme poverty is expected to continue to decline — but all also agree on the bad headline: the world is not on track to end extreme poverty by The chart shows the projection made by the development research team at the World Bank. This projection answers the question of what would happen to extreme poverty trends if the economic growth of the past decade —15 continued until 5 The number of people in extreme poverty will stagnate at almost million.

This is not because it is not possible to end extreme poverty. In more than half of the countries of the world the share of the population in extreme poverty is now less than 3 percent. In fact, the big success over the last generation was that the world made rapid progress against the very worst poverty.

The number of people in extreme poverty has fallen from nearly 1. This was possible as economic growth reached more and more parts of the world. But after two decades of growth the share in extreme poverty more than halved in all these countries.

Poverty was not concentrated in Africa until recently. In more than a billion of the extremely poor lived in China and India alone. Since then those economies have grown faster than many of the richest countries in the world and did much to a reduction of global inequality.

Now it has shifted to Sub-Saharan Africa. The projections suggest the geographic concentration of extreme poverty is likely to continue. Poverty declined during the last generation because the majority of the poorest people on the planet lived in countries with strong economic growth.

This is now different. Development economists have emphasized this for some time: The very poorest people in the world did not see their material living conditions improve. This is an important reminder that one poverty line is not enough and we need to rely on several poverty lines — higher and lower than the international poverty line — to understand what is happening.

We miss this if we only follow what is happening to the rapidly emerging global middle class or if we rely on global poverty lines that are not capturing what is happening to the poorest. The projections suggest that over the coming decade the stagnation at the bottom will become very clear. These projections describe what we have to expect on current trends. The second big lesson from the history of extreme poverty is that it is the growth of an entire economy that lifts individuals out of poverty.

Key for ending extreme poverty globally will be that the poorest countries achieve the difficult task of economic growth. Social policy and direct household-level support, too, make an important difference.

Even in very poor economies there is scope for targeted policies to support the very poorest. We know that it is possible; we have done it many times in the past. The big success of the last generation was that global extreme poverty declined rapidly. But many are still very poor and progress against extreme poverty is urgently needed.

There are many ways in which researchers and policymakers try to measure welfare. However, as we emphasize throughout, this is only one of many aspects that we need to consider when discussing poverty. In other entries in Our World In Data we discuss evidence that allows tracking progress in other aspects of welfare that are not captured by standard economic indicators. This broad perspective on global development is at the heart of our publication.

The practice of measuring welfare via consumption and income has a long tradition in economics. Many classic textbooks and papers provide details regarding the conceptual framework behind this for a basic technical overview see Deaton and Zaidi ; 12 and by now there is also an extensive literature discussing various important points of contention see Ch 2.

Alternative starting points for measuring welfare include subjective views e. These alternative notions of welfare play an important role in academia and policy, and it is necessary to bear in mind that they are interrelated.

Indeed, as we explain below , many of these concepts indirectly enter the methodology used by the World Bank to measure poverty; for example, by helping set the poverty lines against which monetized consumption is assessed.

The most important conclusion from the evidence presented in this entry is that extreme poverty, as measured by consumption, has been going down around the world in the last two centuries.

But why should we care? Is it not the case that poor people might have less consumption but enjoy their lives just as much—or even more—than people with much higher consumption levels? One way to find out is to simply ask.

Subjective views are an important way of measuring welfare. This is what the Gallup Organization did. The Gallup World Poll asked people around the world what they thought about their standard of living—not only about their income. The following chart compares the answers of people in different countries with the average income in those countries.

It shows that, broadly speaking, people living in poorer countries tend to be less satisfied with their living standards. This suggests that economic prosperity is not a vain, unimportant goal but rather a means for a better life. The correlation between rising incomes and higher self-reported life satisfaction is shown in our entry on happiness. This is more than a technical point about how to measure welfare. It is an assertion that matters for how we understand and interpret development.

First, the smooth relationship between income and subjective well-being highlights the difficulties that arise from using a fixed threshold above which people are abruptly considered to be non-poor.

In reality, subjective well-being does not suddenly improve above any given poverty line. Therefore, while the International Poverty Line is useful for understanding the changes in living conditions of the very poorest of the world, we must also take into account higher poverty lines reflecting the fact that living conditions at higher thresholds can still be destitute.

As the data shows, there is just no empirical evidence that would suggest that living with very low consumption levels is romantic. A disregard for or disinterest in poverty estimates that are calculated on the basis of low consumption and income levels is partly explained by the fact that it can be very difficult for people to imagine what it is like to live with very little.

Even economists who think a lot about income and poverty find it difficult to understand what it means to live on a given income level. The most straightforward way to measure poverty is to set a poverty line and to count the number of people living with incomes or consumption levels below that poverty line. This is the so-called poverty headcount ratio. Measuring poverty by the headcount ratio provides information that is straightforward to interpret; by definition, it tells us the share of the population living with consumption or incomes below some minimum level.

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than 1. In the map we show available estimates of the extreme poverty headcount ratio, country by country.

The map shows the latest available estimates by default, but with the slider immediately below the map you can explore changes over time.

Estimates are again expressed in international dollars int. This means that figures account for different price levels in different countries, as well as for inflation. Hence, it is both interesting and important to measure poverty with higher poverty lines. The World Bank also reports poverty headcount ratios using a higher line at 3. Measuring poverty through headcount ratios does not capture the intensity of poverty—individuals with consumption levels marginally below the poverty line are counted as being poor just as individuals with consumption levels much further below the poverty line.

The most common way to deal with this is to measure the shortfall from the poverty line, the amount of money required by a poor household to reach the poverty line. It tells us the fraction of the poverty line that people are missing, on average, in order to escape poverty.

There is a strong correlation between the incidence of poverty and the intensity of poverty: sub-Saharan Africa, where the share of people below the poverty line is higher, is also the region where people tend to be furthest below the poverty line.

Interestingly, the correlation is very strong, but is far from perfect. As discussed above, the poverty gap index is often used in policy discussions because it has an intuitive unit percent mean shortfall that allows for meaningful comparisons regarding the relative intensity of poverty. The two visualizations show the absolute yearly monetary value of the poverty gap, for the world top chart and country by country bottom chart. The numbers come from multiplying the poverty gap index, by both the poverty line and total population.

As we can see, the monetary value of the global poverty gap today is about half of what it was a decade ago. This shows that in recent years we have substantially reduced both the incidence and the intensity of poverty. Below we summarize how poverty has changed over the last two centuries. How historians know about the history of poverty is the focus of a longer text that you find here: How do we know the history of extreme poverty?

The World Bank only publishes data on extreme poverty from onwards, but researchers have reconstructed information about the living standards of the more distant past.

The seminal paper on this was written by Bourguignon and Morrison in In this paper, the two authors reconstruct measures of poverty as far back as The poverty line of 1. This difference in the definition of poverty should be kept in mind when comparing the following graph to those discussed in other sections of this entry.

In , the vast majority of people lived in extreme poverty and only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living. Economic growth over the last years completely transformed our world, with the share of the world population living in extreme poverty falling continuously over the last two centuries. This is even more remarkable when we consider that the population increased 7-fold over the same time. In a world without economic growth, an increase in the population would result in less and less income for everyone.

A 7-fold increase in the world population would be potentially enough to drive everyone into extreme poverty. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of unprecedented population growth, we managed to lift more and more people out of the extreme poverty of the past. It is very difficult to compare income or consumption levels over long periods of time because the available goods and services tend to change significantly, to the extent where even completely new goods and services emerge.

This point is so significant that it would not be incorrect to claim that every person in the world was extremely poor in the 19th century. Nathan Rothschild was surely the richest man in the world when he died in But the cause of his death was an infection—a condition that can now be treated with antibiotics sold for less than a couple of cents.

Today, only the very poorest people in the world would die in the way that the richest man of the 19th century died. This example is a good indicator of how difficult it is to judge and compare levels of prosperity and poverty, especially for the distant past. The trend over time becomes more clear if one compares the availability of necessities like food, housing, clothing, and energy.

As more and more countries industrialized and increased the productivity of work, their economies started to grow and poverty began to decline. According to the estimates by Bourguignon and Morrison—shown in the visualization—only a little more than a quarter of the world population was not living in poverty by From onwards, we have better empirical data on global extreme poverty.

The Bourguignon and Morrison estimates for the past are based on national accounts and additional information on the level of inequality within countries. The data from onwards come from the World Bank, which bases their estimates on household surveys. See below for more on where historical poverty estimates come from.

Since then, the share of extremely poor people in the world has declined very fast—in fact, faster than ever before in world history. There is also an interactive version of this visualization here. We have seen that the chance of being born into extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the last years. But what about the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty?

The visualization combines the information on the share of extreme poverty shown in the last chart, with the number of people living in the world. For the years prior to , we use the mid-point of the estimates from Bourguignon and Morrison as shown in the previous chart; from , we use the World Bank estimates.

As we can see, in there were just under 1. Over the next years, the decline of poverty was not fast enough to offset the very rapid rise of the world population, so the number of non-poor and poor people increased.

Since around , however, we are living in a world in which the number of non-poor people is rising, while the number of extremely poor people is falling. According to the estimates shown here, there were close to 2 billion people living in extreme poverty in the early s, and there were million people living in extreme poverty in In , there were 1.

With a reduction to million in , this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between and , ,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.

Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever. What our history shows us is that it is possible to reduce extreme poverty it is on us to end extreme poverty as soon as possible.

We have already pointed out that in the thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial era, the vast majority of the world population lived in conditions that we would call extreme poverty today. Productivity levels were low and food was scarce— material living standards were generally very low. The first countries in which people improved their living conditions were those that industrialized first. The chart shows the decline of extreme poverty in these countries.

These estimates come from Ravallion Progress was made at a fast pace—in some cases even at a constant pace. We can definitely end extreme poverty in low income countries, and we can do it soon. Other countries have done it before. Second, we can also see from this chart that despite remarkable progress, in some rich countries—notably the United States—a fraction of the population still lives in extreme poverty.

This is the result of exceptionally high income inequality. See below for more on extreme poverty in rich countries. Above, we provided an overview of recent poverty trends country by country. Here we focus on trends from a regional perspective. The first chart provides regional estimates of poverty counts — the total number of people living below the International Poverty Line in each world region. The second chart provides regional estimates of poverty rates — the share of population in each region living below the International Poverty Line.

As we can see, globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than 1 billion during the period; from 1. On average, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined by 47 million every year since On any average day the number of people in extreme poverty declined by , people. In Sub-Saharan Africa however the number of people in extreme poverty has increased and we explained at the beginning of this entry various projections expect that extreme poverty will be increasingly concentrated in Africa.

The following chart shows that the share of people living in extreme poverty has fallen even faster. The International Poverty Line that international organizations like the UN rely on corresponds to 1. Because of this it is important to measure poverty not just by one very low poverty line, but many other poverty lines as well.

The visualization shows the global income distribution in and below we will look at a longer time period. It is of course also adjusted for price changes over time inflation.

What this distribution shows is that global income inequality is extremely high. To read the chart below, choose a level of annual income on the y-axis and then use the blue line and the red line to find the corresponding share of the world population living with less than that income on the x-axis. The first thing that this chart shows is that a large share of the world population lives on very low incomes.

The median income in was 2, int. If you want to consider a poverty line higher than the International Poverty Line , you could chose a line of int. This was a decline of 20 percentage points in one decade relative to this higher poverty line. If you think the international poverty line should be much higher and should instead be 4, int. If you have any questions or would like to request more information, please contact us or subscribe to our newsletter. Basic statistics about poverty in Canada.

The following are statistics about the current reality of poverty in Canada. In Edmonton, 1 in 8 individuals is currently living in poverty. Poverty costs Canada billions of dollars annually. Marginalized Communities. People living with disabilities both mental and physical are twice as likely to live below the poverty line.

Women parenting on their own enter shelters at twice the rate of two-parent families. Racialized women living in poverty were almost twice as likely to work in manufacturing jobs than other women living in poverty. Child Poverty. In Canada, 1. More than one-third of food bank users across Canada were children in The World Bank Group is committed to fighting poverty in all its dimensions.

We use the latest evidence and analysis to help governments develop sound policies that can help the poorest in every country, and focus our investments in areas that are critical to improving lives. This mission underpins our analytical, operational, and convening work in more than client countries. Now, for the first time in a generation, the quest to end poverty has suffered a setback.

Global extreme poverty rose in for the first time in over 20 years as the disruption of the COVID pandemic compounded the forces of conflict and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress. About million additional people are living in poverty as a result of the pandemic. Many people who had barely escaped extreme poverty could be forced back into it by the convergence of COVID, conflict, and climate change. Middle-income countries such as India and Nigeria will be significantly affected; middle-income countries may be home to about 80 percent of the new poor.

New research estimates that climate change will drive 68 million to million into poverty by Climate change is a particularly acute threat for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia — the regions where most of the global poor are concentrated. In a number of countries, a large share of the poor live in areas that are both affected by conflict and facing high exposure to floods — for example, Nepal, Cameroon, Liberia, and the Central African Republic.

The newest and most immediate threat to poverty reduction, COVID, has unleashed a worldwide economic disaster whose shock waves continue to spread. Without an adequate global response, the cumulative effects of the pandemic and its economic fallout, armed conflict, and climate change will exact high human and economic costs well into the future. The latest research suggests that the effects of the current crisis will almost certainly be felt in most countries through Under these conditions, the goal of bringing the global absolute poverty rate to less than 3 percent by , which was already at risk before the crisis, is now beyond reach without swift, significant, and substantial policy action.

The current moment of crisis is extraordinary. Changes in global weather patterns induced by human activity are unprecedented. How the world responds to these major challenges today will have a direct bearing on whether the current reversals in global poverty reduction can be turned around.

The immediate highest priorities everywhere must be saving lives and restoring livelihoods. Some of the policies needed to achieve this are already in place, such as social protection systems.