Poverty Essay

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More than $3billion people in the world which is nearly half of the world’s population are living on less than $2.50 a day and more than $1.3 billion live in extreme poverty which is less than$1.25 a day. (Unicef 2013). One third of deaths a year are cause by poverty. An estimate of 600 million children live in absolute poverty, every year more than 10 million innocent children die of hunger and PREVENTABLE diseases, such as diaorreah, pneumonia and malaria 19 million kids worldwide remain unvaccinated, even a simple net would prevent malaria. During 2011, 165 million kids under the age of 5 were stunted( reduced rate of growth and development) due to chronic malnutrition 870 million people worldwide do not have enough to eat. More than half a million women die in pregnancy and child birth every year… one death a minute. Why do we have cases of poverty in 2014? “Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it’s an act of justice. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man made an it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings”. Mandela (2005). It’s heart breaking that in this day and age there are children dying of hunger, and easily preventable diseases. Poverty reduction is one of the most dominant themes in current scholarship, policy formation and international discussion on economic development. A sign of it importance is shown by the fact that the very first target of the millennium development goals (MDG) is in fact to reduce the people living under $1 a day by half by 2015. Relative to this dissertation the role of economic growth in in poverty reduction is of high importance. Substantial and lasting reductions, if not complete eradication of poverty has been and will continue to b...

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...e when calculating the income elasticity of poverty but According to Heltberg, (2002) in many cases , growth is more important for poverty reduction than changes in inequality, but this does not label inequality as unimportant Heltberg (2002). Heltberg and Ravillion(2002) discover that growth does not alter inequality. Inequality can be held constant as ram does ram (2006,2011,2013) or the gini coefficient can be added to the regression as it is seen on Adams study (2004) where growth elasticity of poverty in developing countries is calculated to be -2.79, a decrease in the proportion of a population living in in poverty to 2.79% for every 1% growth, which is consumption based rather than income based. Regression is used where the rate of poverty reduction(p) is regressed on the rate of growth in GDP per capita and the rate of income inequality (gini coefficient).

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