The United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, has just released his final report, a withering critique of international efforts to eliminate poverty which he describes as the result of “longstanding neglect” by “many governments, economists, and human rights advocates.”
Central to his report are the institutional failings of the World Bank in getting to grips with the scale of global poverty, which it persistently underplays using the flawed measurement tool of an international poverty line, or IPL. The IPL, argues Alston, sets the poverty benchmark at way too low a level to support a life of dignity consistent with basic human rights.
Based on an average of national poverty lines adopted by some of the world’s poorest countries and calculated using ‘purchasing power parity’ (or PPP), the poverty line is ridiculously low, amounting, for example, to just $1.90 a day in the United States and €1.41 in Portugal. But even using this “staggeringly low standard of living” as a barometer of poverty, the report identifies 700 million people living under $1.90 a day.
