| Chapter 2: | Poverty and the Knowledge Economy |
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and Ravallion (2004), progress has been made in the movement from extremely poor to moderately poor, but less progress is evident for those trying to break through the US$2 per day threshold into the category of relative poverty. Although there have been debates about the accuracy of these figures (due to inconsistencies between the household survey data used by the World Bank and data from national income accounts), the overall picture remains clear: “Extreme poverty is concentrated in East Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa” and is rising in Africa (Sachs 2005, 22–24). The particular model used by the World Bank and others has been criticized; Chossudovsky, for example, posited that the entire dollar-per-day model was being used to conceal the globalization of poverty because it does not examine any real-life situations (2003). Though there may be merit in this critique, the dollar-per-day measurement certainly indicates a drastic stratification of income in the world.
The United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR 2005) describes poverty as a preventable disease that takes the lives of 1,200 children every hour. One symptom of the disease is economic inequality: global stratification cannot be separated from the issue of poverty. Although the various methods employed to reconcile this problem have gained much attention and sparked much debate, the magnitude of the inequality remains:
Although poverty reduction will require that the poor gain self-empowerment to produce their way out of destitution, increased resource reallocation could allow international cooperation to play a greater role in reducing economic stratification. One method of reallocating resources is the collection and disbursement of international aid. As of 2000, some