The Economic and Human Dimensions of Poverty

"The Economic and Human Dimensions of Poverty." Gale Essential Overviews: Scholarly,
Gale, 2016.

There are a number of overlapping forms of human deprivation that cannot be neatly classified
as either causes or effects of poverty. For example, chronic hunger and malnutrition are results of
poverty, but they also weaken immune systems, undermine maternal health, encourage an
unsustainable approach to resource extraction, and reduce school attendance and the ability of
students to learn. Saddled with a constellation of problems such as this, an individual or
community faces an extremely arduous climb out of poverty. Although national economic
development is rightly the focus of many antipoverty programs, these other overlapping forms of
deprivation do not necessarily disappear with economic gains at the national level, as measured
by growth in gross domestic product (the total market value of final goods and services that are
produced within an economy in a given year).

Moreover, addressing the multiple overlapping components of poverty can bring gains in
national economic development beyond those achieved through a strict focus on finance and
economics. For example, the gender inequities that characterize many developing societies are
frequently an affront to the consensus international view of universal human rights, but they also
limit economic development by suppressing the productive potential of women. Finally,
economic development programs imposed by outside groups, along with economic policies in
the developed world, are themselves sometimes blamed for worsening rather than alleviating
poverty in developing countries.

The nature of human and economic development challenges varies from region to region. The
countries that have seen the biggest gains in human and economic development since the 1980s,
such as China, India, and Brazil, have followed diverse paths rooted in their own unique
challenges and institutions, rather than enacting a single authorized set of development strategies
such as those commonly recommended by the international community after World War II
(1939–1945). Increasingly, international leaders recognize the need for pragmatism, flexibility,
and knowledge of a particular country's or region's challenges.

Antipoverty efforts in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where extremely low average
incomes are the norm, must necessarily take different forms from antipoverty efforts in the
countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, which have higher average incomes but greater
inequality. Indeed, in spite of the fact that Latin American and Caribbean countries are generally
more developed and economically dynamic than sub-Saharan African countries, the poorest
people in Latin America and the Caribbean are on average poorer than their counterparts in sub-
Saharan Africa. In 2014 the average daily income of people living on less than $1.25 per day was
just $0.60 in Latin America and the Caribbean, compared with $0.71 for the same category of
people in sub-Saharan Africa (“Trends in Poverty Indicators by Region, 1990–2015,” in World
Development Indicators 2014, World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2014.

Reference: https://www.gale.com/open-access/poverty