Back the extreme poverty. For the first time in history, the percentage of our planet's population living in conditions of extreme poverty will drop to below 10%.
To say it is World bank, presenting its projections and updating the new threshold that defines extreme poverty, i.e. those who have less than 1,90 dollars a day (no longer 1,25), taking into account the real purchasing power of individual countries.
According to the latest estimates, in fact, the people who find themselves in this condition are around 702 million this year, against 902 million, 12,8% of the population, in 2012.
A sharp drop, also due to the growth rates of emerging countries, as well as investments in education and health. A decline that has pushed the presidency of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim to affirm that “We are the first generation in the history of humanity that can put an end to extreme poverty”.
An objective which, moreover, is already part of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development, which aims to put an end to extreme poverty by 2030. A target which clearly presents its critical issues, as also underlined by Jim Yong Kim, linked above all to “slowing global growth, unstable financial markets, wars, high youth unemployment rates and climate change!.
In any case, compared to the 90s, the diffusion of the poor has also changed radically, who, today more than ever, reside above all in sub-Saharan Africa, while their share in East Asia has gone from more than 50% to 15%. approximately, thanks to the growth of China and its neighbors. To date, two categories of countries remain extremely vulnerable, those torn apart by conflicts and wars and those too dependent on the export of raw materials.
What is striking, in the numbers released by the World Bank, is the fact that the global spread of extreme poverty has decreased within a period of economic crisis, in which in the richest part of the world we have witnessed, at least in relative terms, to an increase in poverty.
But what led us to such a decline in poverty? While there are many economists (above all Thomas Piketty) who point the finger at the globalization, the main cause of inequality, it can be said that the decline in extreme poverty represents a victory for the globalized world.
To defeat, or at least to limit, poverty, in many parts of the world, much more than international aid, has been the diffusion of the free market and of a dynamism, an unprecedented possibility of getting goods and merchandise in and out.
La globalization, in a nutshell, which in recent days has also found an unexpected defender in Pope Francis: “the trend towards globalization is good, it unites us; what can be bad is the way to do it. If it claims to make everyone equal, as in a sphere, it destroys the wealth and particularity of every people".
But, beyond the Pope's endorsement, just think of the way in which, in the globalized world, famines have seen their disruptive power collapse. As the journalist and scientific popularizer points out Matt Ridley, “in the past, if a local market had a year of bad production, there was a famine. Today, if you have a bad harvest, import what you need: it is unlikely that crop failures worldwide”.
A simple but effective example of what "are the great benefits of trade". A victory, however partial and still incomplete, of globalization and of "innovation, technology and availability of energy", but above all of a model, that of the "sharing economy“, which is set to “have a dramatic effect on poverty reduction.”
An ideal model, but not always implemented and viable. Despite the strong reduction of extreme poverty, many critical aspects remain in the global picture. The economic forecasts for the near future appear less brilliant than initially estimated and the fight against poverty necessarily involves the sustained growth of the less developed countries.
Attachments: The World Bank press release
