Thread by @Noahpinion

1/A new report from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative helps to give us a clearer picture of what's happening with global poverty.

ophi.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

2/Instead of simply measuring poverty by how much money people have, the OPHDI attempts to get a complete picture of quality of life - health, nutrition, education, housing, drinking water, electricity, sanitation, etc.

3/They find that most of the world's poor people live in two regions - South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

4/Note that they don't bother calculating poverty for high-income countries. This naturally leaves out, for example, the >500,000 homeless people in the U.S.
endhomelessness.org/homelessness-i…

(But overall, that isn't going to change the global numbers that much.)

5/The report highlights the progress made in India. With around 1.4 billion people, India has more people than the entire continent of Africa! So what happens there is very important.

6/The scale of India's poverty reduction is compared to China's a decade earlier.

7/The report shows that the poorest areas in India are the ones that have experienced the greatest poverty reductions over the last decade or so.

8/Globally, the region that's doing the worst in terms of poverty is the Sahel region of Africa, at the south end of the Sahara Desert.

9/Just looking at the map for Nigeria, the regional contrast is stunning.

10/Five countries - Nigeria, Ethiopia, DR Congo, Tanzania, and Uganda - account for half of Africa's total impoverished population, according to this measure.

11/Whereas in South Asia, most of the poor people still live in India, despite the incredible progress there.

India is just that huge.

12/The report shows that progress in a few big countries can have a huge effect on overall human poverty. India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan.

It also shows the importance of economic growth. Without growth, India could not have made the achievements it has made.

13/If there's any policy takeaway from this report, it's the importance of pro-growth policies in big poor countries (as long as that growth doesn't cause environmental collapse down the line).

ophi.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

(end)