Poverty Amelioration

The world, it seems, is becoming a better place. That's fairly hard to believe, given the incessant news of conflict between nations and within nations, of nation-wide protests that governments are solving by sending tanks into the streets to use live fire on unarmed protesters. There is news constantly about natural disasters: floods, drought, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, all impacting dreadfully upon vulnerable populations.

But if we were to select from among various causes of human misery one single causative, it would have to be poverty. A close second comes Third-World diseases that eviscerate societies without the medical knowledge and the health professionals and the funding to provide health services and life-saving pharmaceuticals to their people.

But the economically and technologically advanced societies of the world, have always seen it as their obligation to part with a portion of their monetary reserves to help.

And now it seems, from data released in Poverty in Numbers: the Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015 by the Brookings Institute report, along with a UN report on the world's economic prospects, there have been enormous improvements internationally in the poorest, most endemically-poverty-stricken populations of the world.

An astonishingly rapid alleviation of global poverty has been taking place, driven, it would seem, by high and sustained economic growth right across the developing world. There's little doubt that assistance from First World economies through UN-driven programs, the World Bank and NGOs have helped. Figures tell the story that between 2005 and 2010, a half-billion of the world's most needy have escaped living below the poverty threshold of $1.25 a day.

The rapid acceleration of poverty amelioration has resulted in the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of halving the rate of global poverty by 2015, being triumphantly achieved in half the time given to succeed in that course of action.

"A lot has changed in the past six years. The economies of the developing world have expanded 50% in real terms, despite the Great Recession. Moreover, growth has been particularly high in countries with large numbers of poor people; India and China, of course, but also Bangladesh, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Uganda, Mozambique and Uzbekistan - 9 countries that were collectively home to nearly 2/3s of the world's poor in 2005 - are all experiencing phenomenal economic advances."

And, suggests the report, over the course of the next four years, another 300-million people will join the larger contingent that has already escaped the misery of unspeakable poverty.

"Today growth is being driven by a number of big countries which are home to large poor populations. Between 2005 and 2015, India (current population of 1.233 billion) Bangladesh (169 million), Vietnam (89 million), and Ethiopia (87 million) are each expected to grow by at least 6.3% per year. In the process, each is likely to see a quarter of its population lifted out of poverty."

China, Brazil and India are leading the global recovery after the international financial meltdown leading to a prolonged recession, with some European countries left in dire financial straits, requiring bail-outs from the EU and the World Bank. The adoption of market-driven economies with young, entrepreneurial and well-educated people in still-low-paid work forces in China and India resulted in rapid industrialization.

"China's per-capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman."

Who might have foreseen that wealthy industrialized countries like Canada, the United States and Britain with their huge public debts would begin to reverse their economic positions with those of China, India, Brazil? Not quite a total reversal, but an interesting phenomenon all the same. From poverty-stricken to low-income but stable and middle-income but stable on the part of the emerging economic giants.

The reversal seen in the economies of the world's heretofore leading economies; Japan hit by a triple disaster, falling back into deep recession; the United States with its massive debt and growing deficit, its reserves held by China, the European Union patching up Spain, Greece and Portugal. Who might have foreseen it?