Senior fellow Charles Kenny's weekly column in Foreign Policy on poverty elimination.
From the Article
July 11 was World Population Day, an annual occasion on which the United Nations reminds us all of the number of people on the planet -- now approaching 7 billion -- and the monumental challenges entailed in the task of caring for such an enormous human family. Among those challenges was "ending poverty," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a statement, one whose resolution would "unleash ... vast human potential."
That's undoubtedly true -- were a world free of poverty more than an idle dream. And the good news is that perhaps it is.
Poverty is, of course, a highly relative concept, but the usual definition of "absolute" poverty is an income of less than $1.25 a day. And it is an increasingly manageable task to ensure no one on the globe lives below that income. There are already a lot fewer poor people living at that level of destitution than there used to be -- indeed, less than half as many as there were 20 years ago. Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz at the Brookings Institution estimate there were around 1.8 billion people worldwide living on less than $1.25 a day in the early 1990s; the figure dropped to 1.3 billion people in 2005 and further to 900 million in 2010. Chandy and Gertz suggest that if we could accurately and directly supplement the income of each poor person in the world to bring his or her daily income up to $1.25, it would have cost $96 billion in 2005. But by 2010, as the number of poor people fell, that cost had dropped to $66 billion. This is something close to an aid official's dream: a foreign assistance program that actually gets cheaper every year.