Global Poverty and the New Bottom Billion: What if Three-quarters of the World’s Poor Live in Middle-income Countries?

This paper argues that the problem of global poverty has changed because most of the world’s poor no longer live in poor countries, meaning low-income countries (LICs). In the past, poverty was viewed predominantly as a LIC issue. Nowadays such simplistic assumptions/classifications can be misleadin...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Sumner, Andy
Tipo de documento: artigo
Estado:Versão publicada
Data de publicação:2010
País:Brasil
Recursos:Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA)
Repositório:Repositório Institucional da IPEA (RCIpea)
Idioma:inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.ipea.gov.br:11058/15361
Acesso em linha:https://repositorio.ipea.gov.br/handle/11058/15361
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Global Poverty
Middle-income Countries
Descrição
Resumo:This paper argues that the problem of global poverty has changed because most of the world’s poor no longer live in poor countries, meaning low-income countries (LICs). In the past, poverty was viewed predominantly as a LIC issue. Nowadays such simplistic assumptions/classifications can be misleading because a number of the large countries that have graduated into the middle-income (MIC) category still have large numbers of poor people. We estimate that in 1990 some 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in LICs. In contrast, we estimate that in 2007-2008 some three-quarters of the world’s approximately 1.3 billion poor people now live in MICs; only about a quarter of the poor (about 370 million) live in the remaining 39 LICs, which are mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. (…)