PPHP 1: Reducing Global Poverty
Overview:
- This volume conveys and explores the most extensive set of forecasts of global poverty ever made. The forecasts are long-term, looking 50 years into the future. They are geographically rich, building up from the country level to continental sub-regions, continents as wholes, and to the world. With India the study even begins the necessary process of drilling down into countries. Full country detail is available in appendices to this volume and accompanying web postings.
- The forecasts are also very much contingent; they are scenarios not predictions. The volume supplements the Base Case forecast with framing scenarios to provide a sense of the outer boundaries of likely poverty futures. It presents intervention scenarios (individual and in packages) to explore the possible leverage that the global community has to incrementally shift the long-term patterns of poverty reduction.
- Finally, the study, while focusing very heavily on the specific measure of income poverty now at the center of global attention, namely $1 dollar per day, reaches well beyond that measure. It reports forecasts using other measures of income poverty, especially $2 per day, but also $5 and $10 per day. It provides some information on income poverty gaps and on relative, not just absolute poverty. Although more difficult and even more uncertain than income poverty forecasts, the study provides some information about human capabilities and functionings using the Human Poverty Index and Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program. For purposes of consistency across the facets of the analysis and because of limitations of space, the text discusses poverty primarily in terms of the $1 per day measure. Again, however, we invite readers to look at the appendices and supporting analyses for other measures.