FACT SHEET: Poverty
[Compiled by Frances Forde Plude mainly from data in The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, by Manuel Castells.]
1. There are several processes of social differentiation: inequality, polarization, poverty, and misery.
2. Social exclusion creates poverty, barring certain individuals from work.
3. In the past three decades there has been increasing inequality and polarization in the distribution of wealth.
4. In 1998, assets of the 3 richest people in the world were more than the combined GNP of 48 least developed countries, with 600 million people.
5. Since 1980 there has been a dramatic surge in economic growth in 15 countries. But over much of this period, economic decline or stagnation has affected 100 countries, reducing the incomes of 1.6 billion people, more than a quarter of the world’s population.
6. At the turn of the millennium over one third of humankind was living at subsistence or below subsistence level.
7. In the mid-90s about 840 million people were illiterate; more than 1.2 billion lacked access to safe water; 800 million lacked access to health services; and more than 800 million suffered hunger.
8. Women and children suffer most from poverty: In 1995, 160 million children under five were malnourished, and the maternal mortality rate was about 500 women per 100,000 live births.
9. In Russia, the CIS countries and Eastern Europe, the World Bank in 1999 estimated that 147 million people there lived below the poverty line of four dollars a day. In 1989 the figure was 14 million.
10. In 1950, Africa accounted for over 3 percent of world exports; in 1990, for about 1.1 percent.
11. The continent of Africa suffers from lack of infrastructure, being robbed of its resources, predatory states, huge indebtedness, and aid dependency. (Africa was receiving 30% of all global aid in 1999.)
12. Today there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide; there are at least three billion people who do not own cellphones, the bulk of them in Africa and Asia.
13. In Sub-Saharan Africa, urban unemployment doubled between 1975 and 1990, rising from 10 to 20 percent. African food production has declined substantially, making many countries vulnerable to famine, epidemics.
14. By the mid-1990s, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for about 60 percent of the estimated 17 million HIV-positive people in the world. Poverty limits access to information and to preventive methods.
15. In 1999, 80 percent of American households, or 217 million people, had seen their share of national income decline, from 56 percent in 1977 to under 50 percent.
16. The median percentage contribution of working wives grew from 26 percent of family income in 1979 to 32 percent in 1992; household structure became a major source of income difference between families.
17. College-educated men with 1-5 years of experience saw their hourly wages decline by 10.7 percent in 1979-1995.
18. In 1999 the top fifth of the U.S. population accounted for 50.4% of total income, while the lowest fifth accounted for just 4.2 percent.
19. In the U.S., the percentage of persons with income below the poverty line increased from 11.1 percent in 1973 to 13.3 percent in 1997, that is, over 35 million Americans, two-thirds of whom are white and rural.
20. In 1993, 38.6 percent of all female-headed families in the U.S. were living in poverty. 19.9 percent of US children were in poverty.
21. Overall, in the global network society, the traditional form of work, based on full-time employment, clear-cut occupational assignments, and a career pattern over the life-cycle is being slowly but surely eroded away (except in Japan.) This new pattern especially applies to women who fill most part-time or temporary jobs.
22. Dambisa Moyo, a Zambia native, former World Bank consultant, urges investment in Africa instead of aid programs in her book Dead Aid.
23. Nancy Krieger, Harvard professor, notes that the level of income inequality we allow represents our answer to a very important question: “What kind of society do we want to live in?”
24. The microloan Grameen Bank started the careers of more than 250,000 “phone ladies” in Bangladesh setting up shop as their village phone operator, with small commissions as people make and receive calls.
25. In some countries poor people are using their cell phones for banking (moving funds to pay for crops, etc.)