Overview | Despite substantial progress in recent decades in reducing poverty in the world - the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has halved since 1980, more than a billion people still subsist on less than one dollar a day. Over three-quarters of a billion people, many of them children, are malnourished. Each year nearly 11 million children die from malnutrition or disease before reaching their fifth birthday; most of these deaths would be easily preventable in any developed country. Over half a million women die every year in childbirth from lack of appropriate health care, malnourishment, or disease. More than 100 million children of primary school age, the majority of them girls, do not attend school. Staggering as these numbers are, the inequalities in income and other measures both between and within countries are overwhelming as well. Income per capita in the world’s high-income countries, on average, is 65 times that in the low-income countries. Rich countries have 3.7 physicians per 1,000 population, compared with just 0.4 per 1,000 in low-income countries. Maternal mortality in childbirth in many low-income African countries is more than 100 times higher than in the high-income countries of Europe. And even though the recent trend in the distribution of world income shows a decline in inequality, it remains quite high. The economic divide within countries is likewise large, particularly in Africa and Latin America. In an increasingly interdependent world, the high prevalence and persistence of poverty in developing countries have implications for all countries. Poverty and its associated outcomes can no longer be contained within national boundaries. |
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