That’s the title of a new paper in World Development by Andy Sumner, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex. Here is the abstract:
This paper argues that the distribution of global poverty has changed and that most of the world’s poor no longer live in countries officially classified as low-income countries (LICs). It is estimated that the majority of the world’s poor, or up to a billion people, live in middle-income countries (MICs). This pattern is largely as a result of the recent graduation into the MIC category of a number of populous countries. The paper discusses the trends in the distribution of global poverty, and opens a wider discussion on the potential implications for aid and development cooperation.
This new paper looks like it is the published version of a Center for Global Development working paper published in October 2010 titled “The New Bottom Billion,” which is a play on the title of Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion.
To listen to an IDS podcast featuring both Andy Sumner and Paul Collier, who disagrees with Andy’s conclusion, click here. To follow Andy on Twitter, click here.
Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering
The seven billionth person on Earth will be born today according to the United Nations. To mark occasion, the BBC has developed an application that allows calculating your own number. I learned that, of all the people now alive, I was born 4,133,669,462nd.
As is inevitably the case when talking about the world’s population, the birth of the seven billionth person has caused a rash of newspaper articles, newscasts, and blog posts about how this really is a sign that at least two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — famine and death — will soon be here.
For a perfect example of that type of fear mongering, see this presentation, by Australian journalist Julian Cribb.
The Reverend’s New(est) Clothes
But really, Cribb is merely serving us the reheated leftovers of Reverend Thomas Malthus‘ Essay on the Principle of Population. In this book, first published in 1798, Malthus asserted that disease and famine would naturally arise to limit the size of any population.
Thus, because population growth would outpace agricultural growth (after all, there is only a limited amount of arable land in the world), disease and famine would take care of keeping the size of the population in check. Malthus actually estimated that the upper bound was equal to about one billion.