Unwelcome title
I'm not sure about the validity of these measurements, but it's not a great title to win.
India is no longer home to the largest number of poor people in the world. Nigeria is
It is a distinction that no country wants: the place with the most people living in extreme poverty.
For decades, India remained stubbornly in the top spot, a reflection of its huge population and its enduring struggle against poverty.
Now new estimates indicate that Nigeria has knocked India out of that position, part of a profound shift taking place in the geography of the world’s poorest people.
According to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, Nigeria overtook India in May to become the country with the world’s highest number of people living in extreme poverty, which is defined as living on less than $1.90 a day. The threshold captures those who struggle to obtain even basic necessities such as food, shelter and clothing, and takes into account differences in purchasing power between countries.
The Brookings report was based on estimates generated by the World Poverty Clock, a model created to track progress against poverty in real time. As of Monday, its figures showed that India had 70.6 million people living in extreme poverty, while Nigeria had 87 million.
What’s more, the gap is widening: The number of people living in extreme poverty in India is falling while the opposite is true in Nigeria, where the population is growing faster than its economy…
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Labels: Nigeria, poverty
Fighting poverty in China
The peasants' revolt that Mao Zedong led in the 1930s and '40s has not ended the way Mao or Marx would have guessed. Maybe it has not ended.
Xi Jinping Vows No Poverty in China by 2020. That Could Be Hard.
From his home in the mountains of northeast China, Li Zhi has watched from a distance as prosperity has transformed China into a land of high-speed trains, billionaires and skyscrapers.
But the economic boom that made China rich never came to Chashan, a desolate village of 40 people about a six-hour drive from Beijing. Mr. Li, 72, spends his days limping along dusty roads to collect trash in exchange for tips. Stiff and gaunt, he subsists on a diet of rice, steamed bread and hard liquor.
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| Farmyard in Chashan |
Nearly seven decades after the Chinese Communist Party rose to power on a promise of prosperity for all, President Xi Jinping has vowed to fulfill the Communists’ original intent, staking his legacy on an ambitious plan to complete the eradication of rural poverty by 2020.
The plan targets the more than 43 million people who still live on the equivalent of less than 95 cents a day, the poverty line set by the Chinese government…
But Mr. Xi’s lofty vision clashes with a harsh reality across much of rural China. In many villages, young people have gone, leaving older residents to fend for themselves…
“The whole idea of socialism was that all Chinese would have a reasonable living standard,” said Kerry Brown, a China scholar at King’s College London. “The nagging concern is that the Communist Party has created billionaires and a strong middle class, and yet there are still a lot of poor people. That seems to be a massive contradiction.”…
[D]uring a speech marking the beginning of his second five-year term as party leader, Mr. Xi described eradicating poverty by 2020 as one of his chief priorities, vowing to “leave no one behind in the march toward common prosperity.”…
While international organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank have praised the government’s work in helping hundreds of millions of Chinese rise out of poverty in recent decades, some experts worry that Mr. Xi’s plan is more about making headlines than bringing lasting change to poor communities.
Some say the government’s focus on 43 million people is too narrow, noting that millions more live just above the official poverty line in conditions that are not much better. Others say that by concentrating on rural areas, Mr. Xi is neglecting the plight of the urban poor, many of whom are rural migrants…
But the hardest work remains ahead. As many as half of the 43 million people who are officially classified as in poverty could be disabled…
Corruption has emerged as a problem, with more than 1,800 people having been investigated last year for embezzling antipoverty funds…
Then there is the fact that Mr. Xi’s campaign is not focused on urban areas. There are more than 200 million rural migrants in China’s cities, where many struggle to receive education, heath care and other benefits because the local government does not consider them residents. Some fall into unemployment or bad health and live in squalid conditions.
“This is a very big hole in the overall picture, which the government rarely addresses,” said Philip G. Alston, a scholar and adviser to the United Nations who issued a report this year on extreme poverty and human rights in China. “The reality is that many of them are living in extreme poverty.”
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Labels: China, economics, ideology, politics, poverty
The last links are the most difficult
"The last mile… is a colloquial phrase widely used… to refer to the final leg of the telecommunications networks that deliver… services to retail end-users (customers). More specifically, the last mile refers to the portion of the telecommunications network chain that physically reaches the end-user's premises… The word 'mile' is used metaphorically… The last mile is typically the speed bottleneck in communication networks…"
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Wikipedia
The last, toughest mile: China’s new approach to beating poverty
MOST of Tian Shuang’s relatives are herding goats in the barren hills of Ningxia province, one of the poorest parts of western China. But last year Mr Tian came down to Minning, a small town in the valley, when the local government, as part of an anti-poverty programme, gave him a job growing mushrooms and ornamental plants in a commercial nursery garden. His name, address and income (20,000 yuan a year, or $2,900—six times the minimum wage) are written on a board by its greenhouse door…
Minning is a model town. Its poverty-alleviation scheme was set up by Xi Jinping, China’s president, between 1999 and 2002 when he was governor of Fujian, a wealthy province in the south… The system that Minning pioneered is now spreading throughout China. It focuses on poor individuals, and on drawing up specific plans for each, rather than merely helping poor places to develop in the hope that wealth will trickle down to the poorest…
China has been a hero of the world’s poverty-reduction efforts. It has eradicated poverty in cities (by its definition, at least) and reduced the number of rural people below the official poverty line…
Politically, poverty reduction matters because, as one party member says, unless China solves the problem of income inequality, the party’s legitimacy will be questioned. The party owes its power to a revolt fuelled by the miseries of the countryside. It does not want to be accused of failing to fulfil its mandate to eliminate them…
But the last stage of poverty reduction will be the most difficult. China’s success so far has been based largely on economic growth, which has generated jobs for the able-bodied. The final stage will be costly and complicated because many of the remaining poor are people who, because of physical or mental disabilities, cannot hold down jobs. A recent government survey found that 46% of China’s poor were poor because of their health…
There are signs that China’s is indeed improving its main form of poor relief, which is called “subsistence guarantee”, or dibao. The dibao programme has been notoriously inefficient. Many households that qualify for payments do not receive them because of corruption and bureaucratic failings…
All these efforts are aimed only at extreme poverty in the countryside. The government claims the urban kind does not exist, ie, that no one in cities has less than 2,300 yuan a year. But that minimum is too low for cities, where living costs are higher…
At current rates of reduction (more than 10m fewer people annually in extreme poverty), Mr Xi should be able meet his target by 2020. It will be hailed as a great achievement. But huge government effort will still be needed to help the worse-off. It will not be the end of poverty in China.
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Labels: China, policy, poverty
Poverty in Communism
Marx said it was all to end in equality. Of course Marx long ago was replaced by Mao in China. He in turn was replaced by Deng, who was replaced…
Rural poverty: Ham-fisted handouts
On October 16th President Xi Jinping said China would eradicate poverty by 2020. That would mean that 70m people must rise above the official poverty line, which is 2,300 yuan a year (the equivalent of about $2 a day at purchasing-power parity, slightly higher than the World Bank’s global standard). This is supposed to be a priority in the next five-year plan…
Between 1980 and 2010 China cut the number living below the poverty line by around 600m, by far the biggest reduction in a single country ever. It did this indirectly—by building everything from roads and factories to schools and hospitals, thus boosting employment and incomes… Those still living below the line are almost entirely rural people who cannot work for reasons such as age, disability or because their villages are remote and inhospitable. Helping them will require more direct measures, not least giving cash.
The government mainly does this through its “subsistence guarantee” programme, often known by its Chinese shorthand, dibao. In principle, those whose income is below the minimum needed to keep them in adequate comfort…
Most of China’s poorest, however, are not in the programme…
The dibao system was set up by the central government but is implemented by local authorities…
Widespread discretion breeds widespread corruption… In 2012 He Guoqiang, then one of China’s highest-ranking leaders, said of village bosses: “They don’t do their jobs…they don’t really understand which households are in difficulty… and they give dibao benefits to relatives, friends or even themselves.”
Recently, matters have begun to improve. The government has set up a system of cross-checking applications… to limit fraud…. Local authorities used to bear most of the cost of the dibao system. Now the central government pays two-thirds. This should give it more clout in its attempts to improve the programme.
But more needs to be done. “We need to improve the quality of our data and really solve the issue of who we are supporting,” says Liu Yongfu, a senior anti-poverty official in Beijing. The target of eliminating rural poverty by 2020 is unlikely to be met without further reform of dibao.
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Just The Facts! 2nd edition is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
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Labels: China, cleavages, corruption, policy, poverty
No, this is not from The Onion. Nor is it from April first.
Nigeria's Minister of Finance denies that the large number of poor people in Nigeria makes the country an "extremely poor nation." A new method of fighting poverty.
World Bank Lists Nigeria Among ‘Extreme Poor Nations,’ But Finance Minister Okonjo-Iweala Attempts To Redefine Poverty
[T]he World Bank, yesterday classified… Nigeria, in the “extreme poor nation’’ category, but Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, deflected that rating today, saying it was based only on the large population of the poor.
She implied that Nigeria was rich, but for its poor.
In Washington on Wednesday, Dr Jim Kim... classified Nigeria among the world’s extremely poor countries…
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| Okonjo-Iweala |
In Abuja today, Okonjo-Iweala shrugged off the analysis, arguing that the number of poor people in a country irrespective of the country’s level of development was the parameter used to rate Nigeria among nations with high poverty level…
According to Okonjo-Iweala… there is no reason to single Nigeria out because the country is growing and there are poor people everywhere [in other countries]…
She ignored the normal criticism concerning why Nigeria, with massive potential and resources many developing countries lack, find development difficult because of the heavy burden of corruption and mismanagement that are anchored by people at the top.
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entries are indexed.
What You Need to Know is a thorough review of comparative government and politics as described in the AP curriculum.
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Labels: cleavages, corruption, economics, leadership, Nigeria, poverty
Just The Facts! 2nd edition is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
