The New Bottom Billion: Where Are the World’s Poor?

25 October 2010

Most of the world’s poor are not in poor countries. That’s the finding of new research from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. It could lead to a re-thinking of donor aid and ways of achieving the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs.

The new policy briefing by the IDS is called: The New Bottom Billion and the MDGs – A Plan of Action. It’s written by Andy Sumner, research fellow in vulnerability and poverty reduction.

“We wanted to see how poverty had changed over the last 20 years. And what we found was increasingly the world’s poor are living in middle income countries. What the World Bank calls middle income countries. That’s countries of more than a thousand dollars per person (per year). And there are about 960 million poor people out of a total of 1.3 billion or so who live in middle income countries. There’s a bit difference in the popular notion of the bottom billion living in the world’s poorest countries,” he says.

Important because…

“Poverty is increasingly not necessarily only about poor countries. It’s actually about poor people living in countries that aren’t so poor. And that sort of raises all sorts of questions,” he says.

Among the countries are India, China, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia.

“Those countries you named there account for a very significant proportion of the world’s poor.”