Statistics are very useful, and we know you can use them in every way you like. Poverty statistics are extremely useful, because you can show how much progress is being made in the world with development policies. You can also use them to show how disastrous neoliberal globalisation is. If more than one billion people, or 22 % of the world population, is unable to survive, there must be something very wrong with the economies and societies in which they live.
It is clear that for the World Bank, the news it published last week on the declining extreme poverty in developing countries, is very positive. 663 million people have moved out of poverty since 1990 and the first Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty from its 1990 level has been achieved before the 2015 deadline. The number of extremely poor people has come down from 1.94 billion in 1981 to 1,29 billion in 2008. Do not let us spoil it, this is indeed good news.
However, the World Bank itself qualifies its findings.
‘Moving out of poverty’ does not mean your problems are solved. If people just bunch up above the poverty line, they remain extremely vulnerable. And this seems to be the case, since there is a lot less progress when measured at the poverty line of 2 $ a day. There is only a very modest drop from 2.59 billion in 1981 to 2,47 billion in 2008. Finally, the impact of the crisis cannot yet be seen, since there are only data for a handful of countries for 2010. The crisis slowed the rate of poverty reduction, according to the World Bank.
There are more problems.
I will leave it to the statisticians to comment once again on the methodology of the World Bank.
Once more, data have been ‘improved’ and the statistics given today for 2005 are not identical to the ones published in 2008. The differences may not have much influence, but it remains bizarre to see differences of up to 1 or 2 % more or less extreme poverty. For Eastern Europe and Central Asia the difference is 3,5 % (5 % in 2008 and 1,33 % in 2012 for 2005).
The statistics for 1981 have been ‘improved’ all the time. Whereas in 1980 the World Bank estimated the number of extremely poor people in 1980 worldwide at 800 millions, in 1990 it estimated their number in 1985 at 633 million, but in 2004 this became 1,470 billion. In 2008 the World Bank arrived at 1,528 billion of extremely poor people in 1981 and today it arrives at 1,938 billion. This rising number makes it easier of course to reach the wonderful result of halving extreme poverty.
As for the MDGs, the new statistics show that the authors of the indicators in 1990 had good reasons to shift from ‘the number of people’ to the ‘percentage of people’. Indeed, going from 43,05 % in 1990 to 22,43 % in 2008 is almost reaching the goal. But going from 1908,63 in 1990 (and 1815,5 according to the WB in 2008) to 1288,99 is a decline of only about 35 %.
The other point which has to be stressed is the geographical imbalance. Improvements in extreme poverty situations mainly happened in Asia. As for sub-Saharan Africa, the results remain sad. In percentage the extreme poverty rate in 1990 (said now to have been 56,53 % though estimated at 54,9 % in 2008) declined to 47,51 %. In numbers of people, extreme poverty rises from 289,69 million (or 283,7 million in 2008) to 386,02 million. Compared to 1981 (202 million) the number has almost doubled.
It should also be reminded that the World Bank works with a very low and absolute poverty line. Compared with the national poverty lines of Latin America, this gives very different results. According to the latest statistics of ECLAC for Latin America and the Caribbean, the number of extremely poor people is 73 million in 2011 (and declining), which is 12,8 % of the population. According to the World Bank, the region has only 36,85 million extremely poor people, or 6,47 % in 2008.
Finally, as the World Bank itself points out, there are very few data for the years after 2008. If the countries of Latin America do have surveys for 2009 or 2010, in East Asia only 4 countries have while the large majority of countries in Subsaharan Africa are still working with survey data of 2005, 2003 and even 2000. Again, the quality of the statistics in the region where extreme poverty is most difficult to fight, is not really good.
These are some first comments on the new statistics of the World Bank. There is reason to celebrate, yes, but at least as many reasons to remain very pessimistic on the possibility to reach the MDGs by 2015.
And we should never forget that while poverty and extreme poverty are very painful problems for people to live with, they are problems of social relationships. Poverty can never exist without its opposite, wealth. Therefore, poverty may not be the major problem. Inequality is. As proposed by Riccardo Petrella, poverty should be banned, it should be declared illegal. In 2018, we will celebrate the 70th birthday of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. Why not fight in the coming years leading up to 2018 for a UN Declaration to declare poverty illegal?