The Pros And Cons Of Poverty

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Register to read the introduction… Absolute poverty is defined as an individual’s inability to supply or have access to the basic human needs for life – that is, food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, healthcare, shelter, education, and information. Income as well as access to services is measures of poverty. The world poverty line is set at one US dollar and twenty-five cents a day according to The World Bank; however that number varies between each country. In 1964, in a joint committee economic, President’s report in the United States Republicans said, “No objective definition of poverty exists… The definition varies from place to place and time to time. In America as our standard of living rises, so does our idea of what is substandard.” So for example, the poverty line set in the United States would differ greatly from the poverty line set in Ethiopia. Looking at this world poverty line set by The World Bank, in 2005 4.09 billion people in developing countries lived above this line, and 1.4 billion were below the line. One in every two children in the world live in poverty (about one billion), six hundred forty million live without adequate shelter, four hundred million have no access to safe water, and two hundred seventy million have no access to health services (Shah). Places in the world with the most extreme cases of poverty are mainly found in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, (Poverty.hci) but it exists everywhere in …show more content…
A major cause of poverty is illiteracy and lack of education. The governments of developing countries cannot afford to provide good public schools, especially in rural areas. Poverty.hci said that only sixty percent of children in sub-Saharan Africa attend primary school, and the majority of those will eventually drop out after a short number of years, likely to work and help support their family. In the No Nonsense Guide to World Poverty, Jeremy Seabrook stated that of all the least developed countries, forty-five percent of children do not attend school at all. This creates a cycle – families are poor and must keep kids home to work to help generate an income, preventing them from getting an education which allows for better paying careers. Today, in the developing world, there are one billion non-literate adults (Seabrook). Seabrook has made a comparison between a country’s literacy rate and its per-capita income. A literacy rate less than fifty-five percent yields a per-capita income of six hundred dollars, while a literacy rate above ninety-six percent will see a per-capita income of twelve thousand six hundred dollars. This trend cannot be overlooked. Overpopulation and environmental degradation go hand-in-hand with poverty. Overpopulation is a large number of people in one area without enough

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