Poverty Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The United Nations (UN) estimates that approximately 1.2 billion people in the world currently live in poverty, and one-half of those are children. Before 1950, definitions of poverty were generally based on the bread basket theory, which identified the poor as those who were unable to meet minimum food requirements for each family member for a month. Today the definition of poverty is based on the UN guideline of living below one dollar a day. More than one-sixth of the world’s poor meets this stipulation, with the poorest people generally living in sub-Saharan Africa (46 percent) and South Asia (40 percent). In 2000, 189 members of the United Nations adopted the eight Millennium Development Goals designed to alleviate poverty and improve the quality of life within their borders.

However, poverty also exists in the richest nation in the world, Bermuda, with a per capita income of $69,000 and a poverty rate of 19 percent, and in the poorest nation in the world, East Timor, with a per capita income of $400 and a poverty rate of 42 percent. The differences in the quality of life among the poor in the richest and poorest nations may be vast. Developed nations offer social services that, at a minimum, provide food, clothing, shelter, and basic health care. In developing nations, people regularly die because governments either cannot or will not provide basic needs. The poorest countries are generally those in which subsistence agriculture dominates the economy. Scholars have argued that globalization is a key factor in increasing poverty levels in developing nations because industrialization has left some nations out of the loop, and increased gaps between the rich and the poor in industrializing countries.

International aid provides a large portion of national budgets in countries such as Niger, which, according to the United Nations Development Programme, has the lowest standard of living in the world. Government corruption in some poor nations results in withdrawal of international, regional, and national aid. Countries must meet strict World Bank and International

Monetary Fund requirements, including poverty alleviation and anticorruption measures, to qualify for acceptance into the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries program, which provides debt relief for twenty-nine of the poorest countries.

Realities

Poverty may be a result of many things, but most scholars agree that individual factors affecting poverty are sex, race, age, unemployment, divorce, number of people in a family, poor levels of education, and lack of job opportunities. On a broader scale, factors that increase the likelihood of living in poverty are national residence, poor governance, ethnic conflict, corruption, degradation, crime, violence, and absence of social services.

The poor are more likely than others in any society to be hungry, cold, malnourished, illiterate, sick, and unemployed. They have lower life expectancies and higher infant, childhood, and maternal mortality rates. The poor are also more prone to alcoholism and depression. They are also more likely to be outside political and legal systems, more likely to be convicted of crimes with which they are charged, and less likely to seek recourse when rights are denied.

Many of the poorest countries are located in areas where droughts, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters occur regularly with devastating results that disproportionately affect the poor. This phenomenon was made abundantly clear in December 2004 when a tsunami caused by the Sumatra Andaman earthquake in the Indian Ocean wiped out whole communities, leading to the loss of more than 275,000 lives. Natural disasters can also have devastating results among the poorest people in the richest countries. Such was the case when Hurricane Katrina devastated America’s Gulf Coast in August 2005 at a cost of approximately 2,000 lives. Tens of thousands of people from New Orleans were forced to flee to other states when levies broke in the wake of the storm. Many of those who returned remain housed in government issued trailers, facing life in a city with a heavily damaged infrastructure.

Some of the poorest people in the world are those who live in refugee camps where they have migrated to escape from areas devastated by natural disasters, ethnic conflicts, oppressive governments, and extreme poverty. Large refugee populations also place enormous strains on the economies of host countries and may cut into funding for social programs designed to alleviate poverty among existing populations.

Many countries of the former Soviet Union struggle economically, and poverty is a major problem in these transition countries, which have an aggregate poverty rate of 27.1 percent. Individually, poverty rates range from 8.6 percent in Hungary to 80 percent in Moldova. Conversion to free markets has also increased income gaps between the rich and poor. According to the Gini Index of Inequality, which is the most common measure of inequality, income disparity is greatest in Armenia (41.3) and narrowest in Hungary (29.4). The European Union (EU) mandates poverty alleviation programs in transition countries seeking membership.

Child Labor

In response to extreme poverty, parents in Asia, Latin America, and Africa sometimes sell young children as indentured servants. The UN International Labour Organization estimates that employers make as much as $10 billion each year from illegal child labor. The problem of child labor is most severe in Africa, which provides approximately one-sixth of all child laborers.

Indentured children generally live in appalling overcrowded circumstances where they are denied adequate nourishment and access to health care, education, and the joys of childhood. They receive only small pittances for their labor, and even these small amounts are often withheld for months at a time. Brutal employers frequently punish inattentive, sleepy, or slow children with beatings. Although some governments have passed ant trafficking laws, they are difficult to enforce. Outside entities such as the International Organization for Migration have been more successful in rescuing children from virtual slavery and placing them in shelters or returning them to their families.

Solutions

Scholars who study poverty agree that individual governments and international organizations must share the responsibility for alleviating poverty. Poverty alleviation programs generally consist of economic safety nets, increased job and credit opportunities, and programs designed to improve quality of life, education, and health care. Some scholars have found that placing women in control of the family economy in the poorest countries may be a factor in bringing children out of poverty. They maintain that increasing the discretionary spending of mothers leads to improved nutrition and health of children and makes children twenty times more likely to survive than when fathers control income.

Individuals and small organizations can also make a difference. In 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee honored economist Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh and the Grameen Bank for their pioneering work in instituting a program of microcredit in which small loans are granted to those who cannot secure loans from other sources. Recipients of these loans include penniless widows, abandoned wives, laborers, rickshaw drivers, sweepers, and beggars. With loans of only a few dollars, recipients raised themselves out of poverty with the purchase of milk cows, work tools, and merchandise for sale at small stalls. Yunus’s work has inspired banks around the world to invest in similar projects.

Bibliography:

Banerjee, Abhijit Vinayak. Understanding Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Blim, Michael. Equality and Economy: The Global Challenge. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira, 2005.
Bryant, Coralie, and Christina Kappax. Reducing Poverty, Building Peace. Bloomfield, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 2005.
Clark, Robert F. Victory Deferred: The War on Global Poverty (1945–2003). Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005.
International Monetary Fund (IMF). “Debt Relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative.” IMF Factsheet. www.imf. org/external/np/exr/facts/hipc.htm.
Isaak, Robert A. The Globalization Gap: How the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Left Further Behind. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005.
Logan, B. Ikubolajeh, ed. Globalization: The Third World State and Poverty Alleviation in the 21st Century. Burlington,Vt.: Ashgate, 2002.
Petrone, A. F., ed. Causes and Alleviation of Poverty. New York: Nova Science, 2002.
United Nations. “We Can End Poverty 2015: Millennium Development Goals.” www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.
United Nations INSTRAW. “Women and Poverty.” United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women. www.un-instraw.org/en/index.php?option=content&task=blo gcategory&id=143&Itemid=171.

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