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Gapcast number 4 deals with how the world economy has affected incomes of people across
the world. This chart, look at it, is from 1970, it shows the number of people with different
income that year, this ??unpatternd?? On one dollar a day, an unpair of ten dollars a day,
then continue to the few people that live on more then 100 dollars a day. These dollar
are adjusted for purchase power, therefore we can compare incomes across the different
countries of the world. This line shows extreme poverty. Living on less then one dollar a
day, means you wake up hungry, you go to bed hungry, you use almost all of your resources
( be it working hours or cash) to get food. And in 1970, there were 1,4 billion people
living in extreme poverty. And they made up 38% of the world population. And when I fast
forward , you can see what has happened. You can see how the population is growing and
how the population get out of poverty, but slowly, so that in 1990 the percentage of
poverty was 26%, but the number of people in poverty remained the same. How come? When
the number of population is growing, even if the percentage in extreme poverty fall,
the number remain the same. And when I go beyond 1990, you can see that even more people
get better income , but in spite that poverty rate being down to 19% , the number remains
almost the same : 1,2 billion fellow human beings today living in extreme poverty in
the midst of fast economic growth. And what about the future? The projections
tell us that even more people get out of that , and by 2015 perhaps 10% in poverty and perhaps
the number will start falling. But, caveat, I have to warn you: these data on poverty
have very wide uncertainty ranges: it’s very difficult to measure the percentage of
people in poverty. So what do we actually need, and what do we actually know about this,
eh? I can tell you that there are true things, which almost all researchers will agree on:
number one, the percentage of poverty from 1970 has fallen from 40% to half that level,
20%. Why in the same time the number of people in poverty has remained the same? More then
one billion, perhaps up to 2 billion fellow human beings. And the good message, I think
that there is now growing consensus among researchers and specialists that eradication
of poverty is within human range: we can get all people out of poverty. But it depends
on a number of wise decisions. And they must enable the last billion of people to share
the economic growth in the world, and for them, sharing the economic growth in the world
means, first of all, enough food to eat.