Does one dollar a day keep world poverty away?
In Vietnam one US dollar buys half a pound of rice, half a pound of potatoes and a third of a pound of ground beef. In Mexico the same dollar buys a pound of rice, a pound of beans and half a loaf of bread. And in the sleek offices of the World Bank in Washington or the UN in New York, a dollar a day in either of those places is an important dividing line between living in poverty and not. “It’s kind of a minimum living standard for survival,” said Shaohua Chen, a senior information officer at the World Bank, which established the dollar-a-day standard for data from low-income countries in the 1980s. By the bank’s calculation, 23 percent of the world’s population, or 1.2 billion people, live in poverty. Despite the widespread use of the World Bank’s standard, there are deep divisions over how to measure poverty. What are the ingredients of a minimum living standard? Should you count only how much money people earn? How about what they decide to spend their money on? Or what kinds of go
