1 dollaro al giorno?

One-Dollar Koi by Won Park

Sul blog di Prospect, c’e’ un interessante articolo che parla di come il metro di misura del “1 dollaro al giorno” per misurare la soglia di poverta’ mondiale risalga al 1993 e la World Bank abbia deciso di ridiscutere della efficacia ed eventuale aggiornamento di tale soglia.  Ma l’outcome e’ piuttosto controverso:

The World Bank has published two papers on which it is consulting with proposals to change the yardstick – partly to reflect some progress in reducing relative poverty levels since 1993, particularly in China.
 
But the prospective outcome is odd. $1.08 at 1993 prices would become $1.45 at 2005 PPP rates. But the new standard looks like being set at only $1.25 – a drop of 14 per cent in real terms. This, of course, has the effect of reducing the numbers of people below the threshold, and the World Bank has in fact decided to do just this. Having collected information from 75 of the poorer countries, it restricted its analysis to the 15 poorest among these – including 13 in sub-Saharan Africa.

So the new poverty standard is, in effect, $0.93 a day in the original 1993 dollars, and reflects almost entirely conditions in the worst-off parts of Africa.

While living conditions and levels of poverty remain appallingly low in much more of the world than covered by the new calculations, at the same time it would be quite wrong to assume that “living on a dollar a day,” or close to it, can be compared in any realistic way with the daily expenditure of advanced countries. Look at all the things the real poor do not need to bother with – not least all our “defensive” or negative expenditure: from insurance to gambling and from the disposal of refuse to countering pollution.

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