This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Harford.

Listen to Maria Erikson tweeted, at BBC more or less, asking us to look into this claim.

The world spends nearly three times as much on ice cream

as it does on humanitarian aid.

As far as we can tell the source for this is an article called

Every key stat you could possibly want about humanitarianism,

emergencies, etc. Please steal on the website of the charity Oxfam.

I hear it in conferences a lot in the last year and a half.

That's Christina Bennett from the Overseas Development Institute, a think tank based in London. She spends a lot of time at

humanitarian conferences. It's oft quoted because it's an interesting way of

engaging the wider public in a conversation about why it's important to spend money on saving lives

elsewhere.

Well, interesting maybe, but is it true?

The Oxfam article cites data covering 2013, which values the global ice cream market at $59 billion and international

humanitarian aid spending at $22 billion, which is just over a third. So are those numbers

accurate? Well probably not we contacted the market research company Canadian

the source of that ice cream figure and they told

us actually the number missed out all the money we spend on ice cream in restaurants

and cafes include that and global ice cream spending is up to $163 billion a year, more than $20 per person

...