Let’s go back to the claim made by the Millennium Development Goals, that 1 billion people live in absolute poverty today. That’s a staggering number no matter how you look at it, and a trenchant indictment of our global economic system. But a growing number of scholars are beginning to insist that the picture is actually even worse than this. They are beginning to question whether the dollar-a-day threshold is the right poverty line to be using in the first place. The international poverty line used by the MDGs – $1.25 per day – is based on the national poverty lines of the fifteen poorest
...more
