WS MoreOrLess: Did global poverty halve overnight?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2014
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Did the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty fall by half a few weeks ago? That's one interpretation of newly released figures for purchasing power parity around the world. The figures compiled by the International Comparison Programme of the World Bank show that in a lot of poorer countries, things are cheaper than we had thought. One development think tank has suggested that if people in these countries can afford to buy more, fewer of them will fall under the World Bank's definition of extreme poverty. We take a look at the argument to see if it stacks up, and whether the World Bank should be lowering its estimates for global poverty in light of the new figures. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the short edition of More or Less. |
| 0:02.0 | First broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:09.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use |
| 0:12.0 | go to BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:20.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:24.0 | You'll weekly look at the numbers in the news and in life. |
| 0:28.0 | I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:30.0 | On a Wednesday morning in late April, |
| 0:32.0 | the worthy people over at the International Comparison Program, |
| 0:36.0 | which is housed at the World Bank, |
| 0:38.0 | published a new set of estimates for purchasing power parity. |
| 0:42.0 | James Fletcher's here to help me explain why this is actually a fascinating story. |
| 0:46.0 | Yes, Tim, it is fascinating, even if it does sound a bit like a tedious piece of geekery. |
| 0:51.0 | But it's a piece of tedious geekery that's changing the way we understand the world. |
| 0:56.0 | For example, when these ICP numbers came out, |
| 0:59.0 | some researchers in a Washington DC think tank did what they paid for |
| 1:03.0 | and started thinking and calculating, |
| 1:05.0 | and pretty soon they produced this headline. |
| 1:08.0 | Global absolute poverty fell by almost half on Tuesday. |
| 1:13.0 | So what happened there? |
| 1:14.0 | It's not that anybody was hungry the night before |
... |
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