Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: a new approach to poverty, inequality, and development
- 2 Approaches to income distribution and development
- 3 Growth and distribution: a welfare economic analysis
- 4 Inequality and development
- 5 Absolute income, absolute poverty, and development
- 6 Development progress and growth strategies: case studies
- 7 Development progress and growth strategies: conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: a new approach to poverty, inequality, and development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: a new approach to poverty, inequality, and development
- 2 Approaches to income distribution and development
- 3 Growth and distribution: a welfare economic analysis
- 4 Inequality and development
- 5 Absolute income, absolute poverty, and development
- 6 Development progress and growth strategies: case studies
- 7 Development progress and growth strategies: conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The extent of poverty and inequality in the world is staggering. Recently compiled data on absolute poverty and relative inequality in a large number of countries may be found in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 respectively. Just in the countries assisted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), nearly 800 million persons receive annual incomes below $150 (as of about 1970, in 1969 prices).
The president of the World Bank has voiced the human dimensions of these data well:
Among our century's most urgent problems is the wholly unacceptable poverty that blights the lives of some 2,000 million people in the more than 100 countries of the developing world. Of these 2,000 million, nearly 800 million are caught up in what can only be termed absolute poverty–a condition of life so limited as to prevent realization of the potential of the genes with which they were born; a condition of life so degrading as to be an insult to human dignity.
[McNamara in World Bank, 1975:v].In terms of inequality, the richest 5% of income recipients in less-developed countries receive income shares that on the average are five or six times higher than the income shares of the poorest 20% (which means that the income ratios of richest to poorest are more than twenty to one). If the poor in poor countries were compared with the rich in rich countries, the gap between rich and poor would be many times higher.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Poverty, Inequality, and Development , pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1980